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The Brook in the Way 



BY. 



WAYLAND HOYT, D.D. 

AUTHOR OF 

HINTS AND HELPS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE; PRESENT LESSONS FROM 

DISTANT DAYS; GLEAMS FROM PAUL'S PRISON; ETC. 




NEW YORK 

ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH AND COMPANY 

38 West Twenty-Third Street 




k? 



Tke Library 
of Congress 

ungton 



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Copyright, 1888, 
By Anson D. F. Randolph and Co. 



tSmbersitg $ress : 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



TO MY WIFE. 



TN the one hundred and tenth Psalm there is a 
picture, somewhat dimly drawn, of a warrior in 
hard fight* covered with the dust of battle, and faint- 
ing beneath its fierceness. But just there, in his 
way, there runs a brook. The warrior stoops to 
drink of it : its waters heal his pain and chase away 
his weariness, and, with fresh vigor, he lifts up his 
head to renew the conflict. It is just that — a Brook 
in the Way — / prayerfully want my little book to be 
to somebody. If, for any warrior fainting, or for 
any warrior slothful, in the fight of the noble life, it 
shall bring even momentary strength, impulse, clearer 
vision, better purpose, I shall be devoutly glad. 

WAYLAND HOYT. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Hope in God, notwithstanding n 

The Divine Sympathy 22 

The Munificence of the Master 26 

Life between Alternatives 29 

Our Way and God's Way 38 

The True Ideal for Life 45 

The Hindered Life 53 

Unconscious Influence 71 

That Word "Access" 75 

Walking by Faith 81 

The Value of Mcral Plan for Life .... 84 

The Cross the True Point of View .... 8y 

A Use of the Humanity of Chrtst 98 

Leaving the Fishing Nets 102 

The Divine Defence 106 

Inability 113 

The Succeeding Thing 117 

Scriptural Faith . . 121 

The Prepared Life 126 



viii Contents. 

PAGE 

Christ our Prophet 134 

How the Lord helps 140 

A Life Lesson 150 

The World's Spring 154 

A Test of being Christian 162 

Think it not Strange 167 

The Anchor of the Soul 170 

Together 178 

Peace 183 

The Doom of Growing 185 

Truthing It 191 

Thronging and Touching 199 

Comfort for Us 208 

I could do Anything but That 214 

Suggestions from a Bit of Grass 221 

A too Common Notion 231 

In the Way of Duty, and yet Storms . . . 237 

No Difference 245 

Of Not Going On 253 

DlSSUASIVES FROM PRAYER 26l 

Paying the Fare 268 

Rolled away 277 

God's Great Jewel 281 

The Life Vanishing, yet Valuable 291 



THE BROOK IN THE WAY. 



THE BROOK IN THE WAY. 



HOPE IN GOD, NOTWITHSTANDING. 

' WAS climbing in a rail car, the other sum- 
-*- mer, through what is called the " Marshall 
Pass " in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. 
Upward the train pushed itself, and upward 
still, vanquishing the mountains, until those 
heights which just now had seemed almost to 
pierce the sky were beneath us, and had be- 
come subdued into piers and platforms for 
the daring and unconquerable railway, — the 
Rio Grande. At this altitude the horizon was 
very wide, and the prospect was very grand. 
Far below were the valleys out of which we 
had come. But we were delivered from 
them ; we had escaped them. We were in 
the empyrean. 



12 The Brook in the Way. 

And yet, we could not wait there on the 
grand summits, with the continent beneath 
our feet. Soon the train, having passed the 
most lifted portion of the way which had 
been forced through the mountains, — a 
magnificent triumph of engineering skill, — 
began descent. Steadily as we had been 
climbing upward, so steadily were we now 
going downward. Higher and higher rose 
the peaks above us, on which but a little time 
before we had so proudly stood. Deeper 
and deeper did we sink, until — how soon ! — 
we were at the very bottom of the lowliest 
valleys, with their vast and enclosing walls of 
rock ; with their narrow, meagre prospects ; 
with their shadows dense and constant. 

Well, no man's life is a level plain ; much 
less is it a lifted level plain. There are 
summits, perhaps, of high victory and exhil- 
aration ; landscapes of successful endeavor 
open widely; the man feels he has in a 
great measure attained, — business prosper- 
ous ; home healthy and happy ; much of the 
struggle of life behind, much of the triumph 



Hope in God, Notwithstanding. 13 

of it around. Beneath the man are the 
valleys ; above him is the sun ; about him 
are" beckoning prospects. Then, almost im- 
perceptibly to himself, or perhaps with a sad 
suddenness, he begins descent. Somehow the 
man must leave the shining heights. He 
looks about and wonders that he is so soon 
in such a valley. Here are stone walls of ob- 
stacle; dark shadows of disappointment; bit- 
ing mists of bereavement; lagging energies 
of failing health ; heart-sinkings ; numbed 
faith ; sometimes the light of hope almost 
utterly obscured. Not that the man must 
dwell in the valleys ; nor that often such 
descent is not more in internal mood — in 
the discouragements and despondencies which 
come to all of us — rather than in external 
fact. I am thinking only of this general truth 
in life, that it does not always keep the 
heights conquered, that its path dips often 
into the low, close valley. 

Down there in the valley, — what then? 
What help? 

I am relating a true history. It was more 



14 The Brook in the Way. 

in mood than in external fact, but the mood 
was very terrible the young man had fallen 
into. To him it seemed as though every 
hope and prospect were shut off. The way 
was stony for his feet, the walls of rock 
pressed very close upon him on either side, 
the patch of sky above him was of gloomiest 
gray, deepening to black. His heart sank. 
He could do no more than drag weary and 
discouraged steps. Then one whom the 
young man knew and loved and trusted came 
to talk with him a little. He did not say it 
was all dark and sad. He had no need to 
tell the young man that. The young man 
knew that already, well enough. Nor did 
this friend scold the young man, and berate 
him, and taunt him with unmanliness, and 
harshly bid him to forget his sore heart when 
that was precisely the thing the young man 
could not do. This was a wiser helper. As 
he walked by the young man he simply told 
him how again and again the path of his own 
life had dipped into very rough and dark and 
lowly valleys, but how, even down there, 



Hope in God, Notwithstanding/ 15 

though it was very hard to do it sometimes, 
he had never forgotten to hope in God, and 
how always, surely, the good God had led him 
out and up on to the heights again, enriched 
with rare and real experience. 

It was what the breath of spring is to the 
chilled earth, — such help from this helper. 
So the young man began to say to himself, 
" I too will hope in God ; I too will go on 
trustfully ; I will expect the sunshine and the 
better chance and the wider outlook and the 
breezier heights." It is needless to say that 
the young man soon found himself among 
them. Ah, my friend, there is no help which 
one man can give another in this difficult 
world like the sympathizing help of a per- 
sonal experience. 

Now it is for just this reason that the succor 
the Bible yields is so valuable, and so valu- 
able for all times. It is for just this reason 
that the Psalms have been so persistently 
precious to the hearts of men. I remember 
some great words of Thomas Carlyle about 
these Psalms : " David, the Hebrew king, had 



1 6 The Brook in the Way. 

fallen into sins enough, — blackest crimes ; 
there was no want of sins. And thereupon 
the unbelievers sneer, and ask, ' Is this your 
man according to God's heart? ' The sneer, 
I must say, seems to me but a shallow one. 
What are faults, what are the outward details 
of a life, if the inner secret of it, the remorse, 
temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended 
struggle of it be forgotten? Of all acts, is 
not, for a man, repentance the most divine? 
The deadliest sin, I say, were that same 
supercilious consciousness of no sin; that is 
death. David's life and history, as written 
for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to 
be the truest emblem ever given of a man's 
moral progress and warfare here below. All 
earnest souls will ever discern in it the faith- 
ful struggle of an earnest human soul toward 
what is good and best. Struggle often baf- 
fled, down as into entire wreck, yet a struggle 
never ended ; ever with tears, repentance, 
true, unconquerable purpose, begun anew. 
That his struggle be a faithful, unconquerable 
one, that is the question of questions." 



Hope in God, Notwithstanding. 17 

Well, if you are ever weak, with heart sink- 
ing, and down in the valley, turn to the forty- 
second Psalm and read it. I am quite sure, 
having looked quite thoroughly at it, that it 
is right to assume that David wrote it. I 
think it belongs to that sad time in David's 
life when he fled from Absalom. It is one of 
David's songs when he was in a valley of 
the deepest sort; and its key-note, it seems 
to me, is this : " Hope thou in God, notwith- 
standing." 

Hope thou in God, notwithstanding troubles 
external and troubles internal. Hope thou 
in God, notwithstanding the trouble of hard 
circumstances. " O my God," sung David, 
" my soul is cast down within me : therefore 
will I remember thee from the land of Jor- 
dan, and of the Hermonites, from the hill 
Mizar." 

You know the deep gorge of the Jordan, 
with the tortuous and rushing river flowing 
through it, divided the land of Palestine into 
two portions, — that to the west of the river 
Jordan, and the section to the east of it. It 



1 8 The Brook in the Way, 

was the western part that formed for the most 
of the Israelites a home. Here in this western 
portion towered Jerusalem and the main cities 
of the country. Here the hills of Judah heaved 
their rounded ridges, and the plain of Esdrae- 
lon opened its fertile bosom ; and farther 
northward still, Lebanon drew the mantle of its 
snows around its stalwart shoulders. Also in 
the region to the west of Jordan, chiefest of all, 
in the most holy place within its sacred tent, 
there, in Jerusalem, in David's time, gleamed 
the shekinah of God's special presence. But 
the east of Jordan was thinly peopled, was 
given over to wandering shepherds with their 
flocks, was distant and little travelled, — was, 
especially to the favored dwellers in and 
about Jerusalem, the place of exile. Those 
expressions, " land of Jordan," " Hermonites," 
" hill Mizar," refer to this isolated country 
to the east of Jordan, and to some mountain 
ridges, whence, looking backward, the wan- 
derer could see, would get his last glance at, 
much of the pleasant prospect lying to the 
west of Jordan, — Jerusalem, with its flashing 



Hope in God, Notwithstanding. 19 

towers, and the clouds of smoke making holy 
canopy above the holy place as the sacred 
sacrifices were being offered. But between 
the wanderer and his home was the wide, 
deep chasm of the Jordan, — the river with 
its winding rapids, " deep calling unto deep," 
dashing on between himself and all his heart 
held dear. 

Now it was in such exile David stood when 
he sang this Psalm. He was down here 
in this troublous valley of sad exile. He 
was in the east of Jordan. But even here, 
in this external trouble of hard circum- 
stance, he will hope in God, notwithstanding. 
" O thou my soul, hope thou in God," he 
sings. Ah, me, we get into the east of Jor- 
dan of hard circumstance too, perhaps not 
seldom. But hope thou in God, notwith- 
standing. 

So if you will follow through the Psalm you 
will see that in various external troubles of 
insufficient resource, and the bitter, biting 
words of others, — like those of Shimei, who, 
you will remember, cursed and taunted David 



20 The Brook in the Way. 

when he was on that gloomy and hurried march 
to exile, — David is constantly bidding him- 
self, " Hope thou in God, notwithstanding." 

And David is in terrible internal trouble, 
too. Much as he tries to hope, his hope is 
failing. " O my God," sings David, " my 
soul is cast down within me." 

So,n too, there is for David the internal 
trouble that there is left him only the mem- 
ory of past joys, — " for I had gone with the 
multitude ; I went with them to the house of 
God, with the voice of joy and praise." Yes, 
David had gone, but he could not go now. 

So, too, there is for David the internal 
trouble that he has lost the comfort of faith. 
" Why art thou disquieted within me, O my 
soul?" he asks. That word "disquieted" 
means tossed and agitated, like an angry sea. 
Surely David is in the valley ! — but still keeps 
the key-note striking, " O my soul, hope thou 
in God ; hope thou in God, notwithstanding." 

I wonder if any one whose eye may fall 
upon these lines is in the valley, — is to the 
east of the Jordan, is desolate amid troubles 



Hope in God, Notwithstanding, 21 

outward and troubles inward. Well, do as 
David did, — hope thou in God, notwithstand- 
ing. God did not disappoint David's hope, 
nor will he yours. Anyway, anyhow, hope 
thou in God. 



THE DIVINE SYMPATHY. 

ESUS has come from Bethabara, beyond 
the Jordan. He has met the weeping 
sisters. He has asked, Where have ye laid 
him? He has gone on with them to the 
tomb. But glance at Jesus for a moment. 
Mary is weeping. Well, how sad it is. Four 
days Lazarus has been lying in that tomb. 
Putrescence has claimed him. But will you 
look, to see that the face of Jesus is also wet 
with tears? JESUS WEPT. 

How needless such tears, we would say, 
knowing what was in the thought of Jesus. 
There was a mighty miracle in His purpose. 
In a moment now, for these loving sisters, 
there shall be the oil of joy for mourning, 
and the garments of praise for the spirit of 
heaviness. You and I would not weep if we 
could do what Jesus can and will. There 



The Divine Sympathy. 23 

would be on our brows the light of triumph. 
There would be in eye and mien the con- 
sciousness of power. The heat of our victory 
would burn our tears away. We should 
exult. As monarchs, proudly would we go 
forth to dispense our largess. 

But no; Jesus weeps. And who is Jesus? 
He is the effulgence of the Father's glory and 
the very Image of His Substance. He is the 
Word made flesh come to dwell among us. 
And yet He weeps with the weeping sisters, — 
and that, too, on the very threshold of stu- 
pendous miracle. 

Well, was ever revelation of Divine sym- 
pathy more certain or more exquisite? Di- 
vine Power does not dry up the streams of 
the Divine sympathy. With us, in our ut- 
most trouble, is the sympathy of Him who 
came into our nature to tell us the meaning 
of our heavenly Father's heart. 

How much we crave sympathy, — of the real 
sort which goes to the thirsty roots of our 
soul's needs, and bathes them with its nourish- 
ing and soothing waters ! How do we long 



24 The Brook in the Way. 

for this, and how do the withered leaves of 
our lives put on fresh greenness when we, in 
the least, find it ! 

And yet how difficult it is for us to find 
just this which we often want so sorely. 
There are barriers between us. Other peo- 
ple are differently constituted from ourselves. 
Our troubles do not trouble them. Other 
people are in different circumstances. Other 
people have not had our kind of trial. 
Other people are so engaged with their own 
matters they may have neither the time nor 
the patience to understand us, even if they 
cared. The rarest, the most precious refresh- 
ment in the wide world is a real sympathy, 
the healing consciousness that another soul 
really meets and matches ours. 

But this which is so hard to find, this for 
which many a thirsty heart goes on thirsting 
through all the weary years, is to be found, 
for all of us, in the heart of Him who is at 
once our Lord and our Elder Brother. He 
did not misunderstand these sisters when 
they said reproachfully : Lord, if thou hadst 



The Divine Sympathy. 25 

been here. He did not chide them for falter- 
ing faith. He did not misinterpret their sor- 
row. He understood it all. And His Heart 
melted, too, at the fierce fires of their great 
grief. He wept with them. 

My friend, others may not understand you ; 
you may feel yourself a lonely soul; your 
heart may be filled with an incommunicable 
bitterness ; gay you may be outwardly, yet 
so sad and alone inwardly; Lazarus may 
have died ; your best beloved may have gone 
from you into the shadows. But there is 
One who feels with you ; there is One who 
interprets your tears so thoroughly that He 
Himself joins in them. Jesus wept. " If 
you only knew what I suffer," we often say, 
or want to say. Perhaps those to whom we 
speak or want to speak cannot know. But 
there is Divine sympathy. Jesus can know 
and feel. Jesus does. 



THE MUNIFICENCE OF THE 
MASTER. 

THAT miracle in Cana is singularly sug- 
gestive of the largeness of our Lord's 
help. Our Master is regal in munificence. 
At the most moderate computation, the six 
water-pots overbrimming held much more 
than enough to meet the emergency of the 
wedding-feast. The supply overflowed that 
momentary necessity and enriched the family 
for many months. The abundance of the 
answer far surpasses the need whence sprang 
the prayer of Mary. The wine failed for the 
wedding feast, but now the feast cannot con- 
sume the affluence of the supply. 

How often does life thrust us into the ex- 
tremity of these wedding participants. How 
often do our supplies fail. How frequently 
do we consume the precious wine of strength, 



The Munificence of the Master, 27 

foresight, skill, until every drop is drained. 
Yet, though the wine had failed, the wedding 
was not done ; and so for us life is not done. 
There it is confronting us, and we stand be- 
fore it with energy consumed, with shrivelled 
wineskins of useless plans, with faded hope. 
Who of us has not had to come with Mary, 
saying, "Master, we have no wine?" 

The babe had flown away, and the house 
was dark. Times were hard, and the future 
was full of gloom. Expectations were like 
those carrier-pigeons they sent from Paris 
during the Prussian siege ; but yours lost 
their way, and baffled, could but fly back to 
your own bosom. You were in deep extrem- 
ity and trial. You wondered, like Mary, if 
you could not get at least enough assistance 
for your present need. " Master," you said, 
" I have no wine." 

Well, were you not answered? As you 
look back upon it now, do you not find that 
there was ministered to you affluent reply? 
Life went on, but life did not overcome you. 
The crisis struck, but somehow you found 



28 The Brook in the Way. 

yourself prepared. All things have been 
working together for your good. Even the 
empty cradle has been a preacher of truer 
trust. You were not forgotten as you feared. 
You were clasped in a benignant love. 

So, too, if any one be in spiritual extrem- 
ity, with the wine of goodness drained by 
the demands of God's great law, — consciously 
sinful, consciously helpless, — Christ will do 
for you exceeding abundantly more than you 
can ask or think. You shall be justified in 
Him. You shall be sanctified in Him. You 
shall become a son of God in Him. You 
shall be joint heir even of His glory. Christ 
gives, and gives with largeness. " Not as 
the world giveth, give I unto you." 



LIFE BETWEEN ALTERNATIVES. 

IT is the old town of Gloucester. There is 
a bishop's palace in the town, in which 
for many years a holy man has lived ; preach- 
ing lovingly the truth of Christ, doing quietly 
and constantly Christly deeds, binding to 
himself all hearts by the strong bonds of 
Christian love. But now, at the time of which 
I write, the palace is empty of its good 
bishop ; the holy man is a prisoner in the 
sheriff's keeping. 

These are dark days for England. Bloody 
Mary is on the throne. Everywhere through- 
out the kingdom the headsman's axe is flash- 
ing down upon the necks of men and women 
stretched across the block; and the flames 
are wrapping others in their fierce and 
deathly shroud. For the truth of God is bet- 



30 The Brook in the Way, 

ter loved in England than the pleasure of the 
Queen, or life. And she, poor woman, im- 
agines herself doing God service in hacking 
her subjects to pieces, and in burning them 
at the stake, because they cannot — and for 
the life of their souls dare not — think about 
the pope of Rome as she does. So the knife 
and the fire go on cutting and burning, and 
Queen Mary believes herself but the big- 
ger saint the more she cuts and burns her 
people. 

Now this good bishop here in Gloucester 
loves Christ, but not the pope. He in his 
soul believes that the pope is anti-Christ; 
and like the true, brave man he is, has said 
so. Thus it comes to pass that on this night 
he is a prisoner guarded by the sheriff, rather 
than a free and honored bishop in his own 
palace. He has been carried up to London 
to be tried. There they have found him 
guilty of heresy. Queen Mary has signed 
his death-warrant. He has been ordered back 
to Gloucester, that his execution, under the 
shadow of his home and in the presence of 



Life between Alternatives. 31 

his fellow-citizens, may properly affect them, 
both with the guilt of heresy and the awful 
danger of it. But the bishop goes to sleep 
in the strength of faith, and cheerful with the 
serenity of a quiet conscience. He sleeps 
soundly until the early morning, and then, 
rising, passes the hours in solitary prayer. In 
the course of the day young Sir Anthony 
-Kingston, one of the commissioners appointed 
to superintend the execution, expresses a 
wish to see him. This Kingston is an old 
acquaintance, the bishop having been the 
means of bringing him out of evil ways. He 
enters the room unannounced. The bishop 
is on his knees, and looking round at the 
intruder, does not at first know him. Kings- 
ton tells his name, and then, bursting into 
tears, exclaims : " Oh, consider ! Life is 
sweet, and death is bitter; therefore, seeing 
life may be had, desire to live, for life here- 
after may do good." But the bishop answers : 
" I thank you for your counsel, yet it is not 
so friendly as I could have wished it to be. 
True it is, alas ! Master Kingston, that death 



32 The Brook in the Way* 

is bitter and life is sweet; therefore I have 
settled myself, through the strength of God's 
Holy Spirit, patiently to pass through the fire 
prepared for me, desiring you and others 
to commend me to God's mercy in your 
prayers." " Well, my lord," says Kingston, 
" then there is no remedy, and I will take my 
leave." So they part, the tears on both their 
faces. So that day wears on, and then an- 
other night ; and then the bishop is led forth 
to his execution. The morning is wet and 
windy ; the scene of the execution is an open 
space opposite the college, near a large elm 
tree, where the bishop has been accustomed 
to preach. Thousands are gathered round; 
some have climbed the tree and are seated 
in the storm and rain among the leafless 
branches. A company of priests are in the 
room over the college gates, looking out 
" with pity or satisfaction, as God or the 
devil is in their hearts." The bishop has 
suffered in his prison from sciatica, and is 
lame; but he limps cheerfully along with a 
stick, and smiles when he sees the stake. He 



Life between Alternatives. 33 

kneels praying, at the foot of it. As he be- 
gins to pray, a box is brought and placed on 
a stool before his eyes. There in that box is 
his pardon, they tell him, if he will only re- 
cant. " Away with it ! away with it ! " the 
bishop cries ; that is his only answer. " De- 
spatch him then," the authorities reply, ''see- 
ing there is no remedy." They undress him 
to his shirt, put gunpowder between his legs 
and under his arms, fasten him to the stake 
with an iron band, and arrange the fagots 
round him, the bishop helping them with his 
own hand. But the wood is green and will 
only scorch, not burn. A violent flame para- 
lyzes the nerves at once ; a slow fire is torture. 
They throw more fagots on and light them. 
The flames mount up, and singe and scorch 
the martyr's face, but sink again, — the hot, 
damp sticks smouldering around his legs. 
" For God's sake, good people, let me have 
more fire," he cries out. A third time they 
give him flame. This time the powder is 
exploded, but it does not destroy him ; there 
is not enough of it, or it has been badly 

3 



34 The Brook in the Way. 

placed. "Lord Jesus, have mercy on me! 
Lord Jesus, receive my spirit ! " he cries. 
These are his last words, but he moves, beat- 
ing his breasts with his hands for a long 
time. It takes three quarters of an hour to 
finish him, but at last, Bishop Hooper of 
Gloucester dies. 

Such, as I have gathered it from Mr. 
Froude, is the story of the heroic bishop's 
martyrdom. It is well for us to remember 
that it is by such tortured hearts and hands 
as these that our precious heritage of reli- 
gious liberty has been delivered to us. 
Let us be wisely watchful lest the bloody 
Popish spirit gain the upper hand again. 
Where that is sovereign, religious liberty 
must die. 

But this little snatch of real history is ca- 
pable of a very practical application to each 
one of us. It illustrates in a signal way a 
momentous fact for every life, — the fact of 'the 
irresistible necessity of choice. Kingston dis- 
turbs the bishop at his prayers, and puts the 
choice to him tearfully, appealingly, " Oh, 



Life between Alternatives. 35 

consider ! life is sweet and death is bitter." 
But the bishop, strong with God's strength, 
answers, " I have settled myself patiently to 
pass through the fire prepared for me." 
There is the stake fixed ; there are the fag- 
ots piled ; here are the royal executioners ; 
there is the bishop kneeling at the stake ; by 
his side upon that stool they place the box 
which holds his pardon, if he will but recant. 
" Away with it ! away with it," cries the 
bishop, — choice, the absolute necessity of 
it, meeting him again ; and the necessity is 
most nobly met, and the choice is most nobly 
made. Better God's truth and the flame 
than the devil's lie and life. Bishop Hooper 
stands between alternatives ; he cannot help 
standing there. It is the doom of life that it 
be put there. 

None the less truly is the life of every one 
of us in such position. For us life is between 
alternatives. We may not be obliged to 
choose with Bishop Hooper between martyr- 
dom and recreancy to duty. But there are 
on either side of us alternatives between 



36 The Brook in the Way. 

which we must choose. We cannot serve — 
that is to say, be at once the slave of — God 
and Mammon. Here wisdom, there folly; 
here the fear of the Lord, there the forget- 
fulness of the Lord; here righteousness, 
there wrong ; here fealty to conscience, there 
fealty to sin; here Christ, there the world, 
the flesh, the devil. Between alternatives 
such as these every human life is set. Be- 
tween alternatives such as these every one 
of us must, every one of us does make his 
choice. One can ask himself no more impor- 
tant question than this, Toward which alter- 
native does my choice turn? For it is an- 
other grave fact of life that while we are kings 
in the realm of choice, we are forevermore 
slaves in the realm of the results flowing out 
of choice. If we choose self and sin we can- 
not help receiving the destruction which be- 
longs to them. If we choose Christ nothing 
can prevent our inheritance of His own glory. 
But the eternal blessing or the eternal blight 
hinges on our choice. Life is between alter- 
natives. 



Life between Alternatives. 37 

" Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, 
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil 

side. 
Some great cause — God's new Messiah — offering each 

the bloom or blight, 
Parts the goats upon the left hand and the sheep upon the 

right, 
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and 

that light." 



OUR WAY AND GOD'S WAY. 

(^ERTAINLY one of the most stupendous 
J merely human figures, if not the most, 
who has ever appeared upon this planet is 
Moses. Historian, emancipator, statesman, 
legislator, soldier, seer, bard, — his fame is 
as fresh to-day as when they talked of him 
in the court of Pharaoh when the Pyramids 
were young. 

Tradition has wreathed his name with won- 
der, but his authentic history is not less won- 
derful. You know the story well enough, — 
of the doom under which he was born, of his 
strange rescue from it, of his becoming the 
foster-son of Pharaoh's daughter, of his long 
dwelling amid the culture and brightness and 
power of the Egyptian palace, of the lofty 
family ties he formed, of the resplendent 
worldly prospects in which he stood. 



Our Way and God's Way. 39 

So forty years had sped away, and then 
there came to Moses the real and momentous 
crisis of his life. How it came we do not 
know. But it came, — the crisis of choice 
between identification with the lordly Egyp- 
tians and identification with his own enslaved 
people ; between the palace and the brick- 
yards. Thus the choice turned for him : 
" By faith Moses, when he was come to 
years, refused to be called the son of Pha- 
raoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer 
affliction with the people of God than to 
enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season ; es- 
teeming the reproach of Christ greater riches 
than the treasures of Egypt." 

Moses chose for duty and for God, though 
that choice shut against him the palace and 
opened for him but the hovel of slaves. So 
Moses goes forth to take up his duty of 
emancipation. He will do it at once ; he 
will do it in his own way. The whole trend 
of the record shows that he will do it in his 
own strength rather than in God's. He has 
fame enough, influence enough, might enough, 



40 The Brook in the Way. 

he thinks, to accomplish it. Let him but 
strike the blow, and these oppressed people 
will rise and gather to him. He will organize 
revolt ; he will meet and master Pharaoh ; 
he will do it. So he goes out to his brethren, 
to see their burdens. Soon he spies an Egyp- 
tian smiting a Hebrew. Moses takes the He- 
brew's part, makes the Egyptian bite the dust, 
and hides his dead body in the sand. He 
has struck the first blow. Next day he sees 
two Hebrews striving together. He remon- 
strates with them. Why should Hebrew fail 
out with Hebrew? And then the injurer 
answers, denying his authority, distinctly re- 
pudiating his mission : " Who made thee a 
prince and a judge over us? Intendest thou 
to kill me, as thou killedst the Egyptian?" 

That speech opens Moses's eyes. He is 
ready, but his brethren are not. They will 
not own him ; they will not be led by him. 
That hasty deed of deliverance wrought yes- 
terday cannot be the signal of the massing of 
the Hebrews against their oppressor. They 
do not want the services of Moses ; they turn 



Our Way and God's Way, 41 

from him. Pharaoh gets wind of the matter. 
There is nothing but flight for Moses. So 
the desert of Arabia, the shadows of Horeb, 
the quiet tending of Jethro's flocks, conceal 
him there in silence and delay for forty 
years. 

That is one scene. Moses has chosen 
rightly. There is no more splendid pict- 
ure in history than that calm turning of his 
from that future of royalty, the power of 
it, the chance of it, the magnificence of 
it, to utter self-identification with a despised 
herd of brick-yard slaves. Moses has chosen 
rightly, nobly; but — and this is the point 
just now — in the carrying out of his choice, 
in the realization of it, in the turning of his 
noble thought of deliverance for his people 
into noble deed of deliverance for them, he 
has failed miserably. He is hunted fugitive ; 
he is shrinking exile in the desert; he is 
sheep-tender, — he is nothing more. That is 
one scene. 

Well, forty years more go on. There is 
Moses in that Arabian desert, learning in the 



42 The Brook in the Way. 

school of disappointment, in the school of 
disaster, in the school of delay. Sometimes 
God puts us to hard schools. Sometimes we 
must be put into hard schools because it is 
only in these that we can be brought to the 
learning of our most needful lessons. Forty 
years go on. It takes a long time. It is not 
always that right choice opens into a beau- 
tiful garden ; sometimes it is introduction to 
rocks and desert. 

But one day, there in the desert, the flam- 
ing but unconsuming thorn-thicket arrests 
Moses. And from amidst it comes the divine 
call and commission, " Come now therefore, 
and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou 
mayest bring forth my people, the children 
of Israel, out of Egypt." . 

But now this Moses of the desert has be- 
come a different man from that Moses of the 
palace. He has learned his lessons in these 
hard desert schools. He is no more the self- 
trustful, self-asserting, self-sufficient Moses of 
the old time. He has grown distrustful of him- 
self; he is not so sure that he can do things as 



Our Way and God's Way, 43 

of yore. But at last, when God assures him of 
His presence, of the girding of His strength, 
of supply from His resources, Moses takes up 
the duty and in God accomplishes it. Pha- 
raoh is baffled, not now by Moses, but by 
God through Moses. And at last, upon the 
top of Nebo, Moses looks down upon the 
tents of the delivered Israelites filling all the 
valleys round, and forward into the wide and 
sunny reaches of the Promised Land, to the 
edge of which he has led the delivered peo- 
ple, and dies victor, not because of self, but 
because of God. That is the other scene, 
Moses victor through God. 

Oh, there is immeasurable difference be- 
tween that word in the second chapter of the 
Exodus, " And it came to pass in those days, 
when Moses was grown, that he went out un- 
to his brethren," and that word in the third 
chapter of the Exodus, " Come now therefore, 
and /will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou 
mayest bring forth my people." There is all 
the difference between spiritual success and 
spiritual failure. 



44 The Brook in the Way, 

This, then, is God's way. Let us not try to 
live a noble life in our own way. We choose 
Christ and by faith begin the noble life, and 
that is superlatively right and wise. But let 
us not think we can ourselves go on and tri- 
umphantly smite down the hindering Pha- 
raohs. The faith in which we begin must be 
the faith in which we continue. Said Jesus, 
" Without me ye can do nothing." 



THE TRUE IDEAL FOR LIFE. 

TT was not so wonderful that a baby should 
"■■ be born. Birth was already a mystery so 
common that it had been much stripped of 
its wonder. Birth — that strange advent of 
the child out of the unknown into this sad 
and wailing world — had been taking place 
since, back four thousand years, Adam and 
Eve had bent in awe above their first-born. 

Nor was it so uncommon that a babe should 
be born into poverty, and find a manger for 
a cradle. Caves are not rare in Palestine. 
Much of the rock of the country is soft 
and porous, and scooped out easily. It was 
quicker, easier, and cheaper to gouge out a 
cave than to build a barn. Caves in that 
country are sometimes dwellings, sometimes 
sepulchres, sometimes strongholds, sometimes 
tarrying-places for the night when no better 



46 The Brook in the Way, 

inn is by, sometimes stables. So it was no 
uncommon thing for people to be found abid- 
ing in such places. 

Then as to the manger, or crib. Dr. 
Thomson, in " The Land and the Book," tells 
us that " it is common to find two sides of 
the one room, where the native farmer resides 
with his cattle, fitted up with these mangers, 
and the remainder elevated about two feet 
higher for the accommodation of the family. 
The mangers are built of small stones and 
mortar, in the shape of a box, or rather of a 
watering trough ; and when cleaned up and 
whitewashed, as they often are in summer, 
they do very well to lay little babies in. In- 
deed," he says, " our own children have slept 
there in our rude summer retreats on the 
mountains." 

So the fact that a babe should first open 
his eyes in a cave where they stabled cattle, 
or that he should find for a cradle the man- 
ger out of which the oxen fed, must not be 
thought of as anything so extraordinary that 
it was never heard about before. It was 



The True Ideal for Life. 47 

something quite usual for life running on the 
lower levels. It only signified that this child 
began at the lowest, had his portion with the 
poorest; that there were no separations of 
wealth or palace between this child and the 
lowliest Hebrew baby anywhere in Palestine. 
Nor was it such an unusual thing that this 
life beginning here in this manger at Bethle- 
hem, as it grew into childhood, and strength- 
ened into youthhood, and developed into 
manhood, should be smitten with much sor- 
row. I am sure that from the time of Adam's 
sin down to the birth-night of this babe in 
Bethlehem, there had never been a human 
life devoid of sorrow. This babe had but 
grown up to share in the human heritage. 
There had been poverty before He came. 
There had been breaking hearts before He 
came. There had been eyes blinded with 
tears before He came. There had been fail- 
ure of friendship before He came. There had 
been weariness before He came. There had 
been scoffs and scorn and bitter words before 
they fell on Him. 



48 The Brook in the Way. 

Nor was it an experience altogether so 
unique that this life, beginning here in Beth- 
lehem, should terminate on a cross and by it. 
Crosses were by no means uncommon in those 
days. Crucifixion was a very usual method 
of Roman punishment. At certain times you 
could have seen the highways lined with 
crosses, clasping their victims in their horrid 
arms. Many a man had hung the weary hours 
through, while the blood flowed laboringly, 
while the hot sun smote mercilessly upon the 
unclothed body and the unprotected head, 
while fever scorched the brain and parched 
the throat and lips ; while the death, so longed 
for, seemed so tardy in its coming, — and did 
not come until at last hunger killed, or the 
vultures wheeling round and round over the 
victim's head, waiting for their prey, grew 
impatient, and, dashing at him, tore his vitals 
out. Crucifixion was something too terribly 
common then. 

And yet there never was a birth or life or 
death so utterly uncommon, so stupendously 
unique, so separate in its infinite wonder, as 



The True Ideal for Life, 49 

the birth which transpired on that night in 
Bethlehem ; as the life which flowed out of it ; 
as the death which found its consummation 
on the cross. Babes had been born and laid 
in mangers many times before ; but never 
such a babe as this, over which the Virgin 
Mother hung in trembling joy and awe. 
Lives had been struck with sorrow often; 
but never with such sorrow or for such rea- 
son as smote this life. Crosses had carried 
many victims ; but never had cross brought 
death to such a victim. Beyond all births 
was this birth ; beyond all lives was this life ; 
beyond all deaths was this death. 

And if you ask the reason for the infinite 
separateness between this and every other 
which had ever been or can ever be again, 
these verses, in some respects the most won- 
derful in the whole Scripture, shall declare 
the reason to you. 

" Let this mind be in you which was also 
in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of 
God, thought it not robbery to be equal with 
God [that is, deemed not His equality with 

4 



50 The Brook in the Way, 

God a thing to grasp at], but emptied Him- 
self, taking upon Him the form of a servant, 
being made in the likeness of men; and, 
being found in fashion as a man, He humbled 
Himself, becoming obedient even unto death, 
and that the death of the cross." 

It was because that birth was the birth of 
one equal with Jehovah, yet who did not 
grasp at such equality ; it was because that 
life was a life stooping from the throne of 
the Highest to share the sorrow which be- 
longed to men, that thus it might become 
touched with all the feelings of our infirmi- 
ties ; it was because that death was a death 
to which the Only-begotten Son humbled 
Himself, in order that tasting death for every 
man, men might be delivered from it, — it is 
this which makes that birth and life and death 
so unique and singular. 

The Creator descended into creaturehood 
there in Bethlehem. The King became the 
servant. 

And the mainspring of such sacrifice the 
Apostle discloses in another place : " For ye 



The True Ideal for Life. 51 

know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that 
though He was rich yet for your sakes He 
became poor, that ye through His poverty 
might become rich." For our sakes. These 
are the words which sounding over the abys- 
mal sacrifice of that birth and life and death, 
explain them all. The love of self in Deity 
was nothing ; the love of others, everything. 

And now the Apostle, in the second chap- 
ter of the Epistle to the Philippians, gathers 
up all this magnificence of sacrificial display 
in Deity, and moulds it into a reason why 
you and I should live ourselves the self-sacri- 
ficing life. He says to these Philippians, — 
Be not selfish people. Do not think that 
everything in the world must gravitate to the 
centre of the self. Do not care simply for 
yourselves, and let everybody else go. Do 
not look each of you on his own things, but 
each of you on the things of others also. 
And if you want to know why you should 
do so, why then remember that you are 
Christians, and that therefore you ought to 
have the mind of Christ; and the mind of 



52 TJje Brook in the Way. 

Christ was a mind of care for others, even to 
the extent of emptying Himself of the Divine 
glory. 

A life of Christ-like care for others — that, 
then, is the Apostle's ideal for the true life. 
Self last, not first. Let this mind be in you 
which was also in Christ Jesus. 



THE HINDERED LIFE. 

" The prisoner of Jesus Christ.'''' 

A SMALL man, so diminutive as to be 
£*- even mean in presence; stooping, as 
though burdened with thinking and with care ; 
head bald ; nose hooked ; beard and skirt of 
hair around the head sprinkled with gray ; eye- 
brows drawn together, as those of a man who 
thinks and toils intensely; eyes light blue, 
with the kindliest of radiance in them, but 
chronically inflamed and weak; a man who 
in battered frame looks as though for many 
years he had known hard usage ; yet most 
affable in manner and of the gentlest and 
most courteous speech, and his whole nature 
constantly aglow with the fervor of the Holy 
Spirit, — such are some of the traditions of 
mien and look which have come down to us 
concerning this prisoner of Jesus Christ. 



54 The Brook in the Way. 

Some dim room somewhere in the world's 
metropolis, probably in near neighborhood 
to the barracks of the Praetorian Guard, — 
not a sumptuous room, for this prisoner of 
Jesus Christ has no personal means, and now 
in his imprisonment cannot ply his craft of 
tent-making, and so must depend for money 
to pay for this hired lodging on the small 
gifts of his poor friends, — some dim, bare 
lodging somewhere in the great city is his 
prison. It is a vast boon that such a prison 
can be his ; that he is not thrust into one of 
the damp, chill, black holes gouged out of 
the rock, which in that hard age were used 
for prisons. Here in this hired lodging he is 
accessible to any who may choose to come to 
him; he may have companions who may 
abide with him; he may have his parch- 
ments and ink-horn and pen, or stylus ; he 
may dictate to some friend who can handle 
the pen more easily than he can, in the dim 
room, and with his poorly seeing eyes. Yes ; 
there are a good many ameliorations in his 
imprisonment. It is not nearly so bad as it 



The Hindered Life. 55 

might be in those cruel times, — as it came 
to be for him, not very long afterwards, when 
he was a prisoner in Rome for the second 
time. And yet he is a prisoner, hampered, 
hindered, as prisoners must be. I doubt if, 
for two years or more, he stepped beyond 
the threshold of that room, as he waited in it 
for the laggard Roman court to reach his 
trial. All his former active, intense, busy, 
enterprising life must now come to an end in 
the weary stagnancy of this confinement ; he 
can never be alone a moment of the night or 
day, for from his wrist goes a coupling-chain 
to the wrist of a Roman soldier detailed to 
guard him ; and he can make no motion by 
day or night unaccompanied by the sorry 
music of this fettering chain. 

Yes; he is indeed a prisoner, and very 
closely kept in prison, too, — this prisoner of 
Jesus Christ. 

Well, what of him? A good deal of him, 
a good deal of very solid help and comfort 
for you and me if we will attentively consider 
him. For it seems to me that though, when 



56 The Brook in the Way. 

we look at our wrists, we can see no coup- 
ling-chain upon them, and though when we 
choose, we can go out of our front-doors for 
business or exercise, with none to hinder us, 
yet, in a very real way, this prisoner of Jesus 
Christ is a quite close type and illustration of 
the most of us. For there is no fact in life 
more certain and more iron than that life has 
its limitations and boundaries, as real and un- 
escapable as were the stone walls of the poor 
lodging of this prisoner of Jesus Christ. 

I was talking with a soldier the other day, 
who knew those two brave, pushing men, 
members of the recent Greely Arctic Expe- 
dition, who got a good many degrees nearer 
the North Pole than anybody else ever had. 
There they were, away up there, with the 
great, fascinating, tantalizing secret not much 
more than two hundred miles away from 
them, and they looking toward it and peer- 
ing toward it with their field-glasses ; but yet 
they could not go on toward it and solve the 
secret. They were too far away from sup- 
plies ; they did not have sufficient provision 



The Hindered Life. 57 

with them ; they were too much exhausted ; 
the cold was too bitter; the boundaries of 
the impossible shut down and hedged them 
in. It seems a grievous thing that such en- 
terprise should be so balked, — that the great 
secret should be so near, and yet so far. 

Well, that is like life again. You push on 
and you come to an invincible limitation. 
You start to go, and a coupling-chain, from 
which you cannot free yourself, drags you 
back. On every side there are these boun- 
daries, prison walls, coupling-chains. 

There are boundaries of faculty. Even 
Sir Isaac Newton had to say he was only 
like a little child, picking up here and there 
a pretty pebble or colored shell on the shore, 
while the great ocean of truth lay all unex- 
plored before him. 

There are boundaries springing out of our 
dearest and best relationships. It seems to 
me that there is wonderful closeness to life in 
these words our Lord said to Peter: " When 
thou wast young, thou girdest thyself and 
walkedst whither thou wouldest; but when 



58 The Brook in the Way. 

thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy 
hands and another shall gird thee, and carry 
thee whither thou wouldest not." How true 
that is ! As a man goes on in life, he be- 
comes more and more conscious of life's limi- 
tations, finds himself more and more wrapped 
about and entangled by them. Lord Bacon 
says, " A man who has a wife and children 
has given hostages to fortune." So he has. 
It is a very dear and delightful imprisonment, 
this of the home, and as soon as he may a 
young man ought to enter into it. But he 
ought to enter into it thoughtfully and sol- 
emnly, knowing that the taking to himself 
the responsibilities of such intimate and 
weighty relationship toward others must and 
ought to restrict him ; that he can no longer 
be the man simply for himself, but must be 
willing to become the husband ; that is, the 
house-band, — the man who binds the house 
together for the sake of others. Yes, many 
times a man must say, " I would do thus and 
so, pursue this line of work, range through 
this travel, allow myself this luxury, were it 



The Hindered Life, 59 

not for wife and children." He has become 
the Peter set in a household ; and he cannot 
be so free to consult his own convenience or 
to follow his own plans as he was when he 
was the young and solitary Peter not set in 
a household; and he ought not to expect 
to be. 

Then there are boundaries of real and 
hindering troubles, — chance small ; pay mea- 
gre ; sickness among those you love ; sick- 
ness in the self; maladjustment of circum- 
stances ; a secret bitterness eating the heart 
away, which no one must know about but 
the heart's self; disappointments, infelici- 
ties, sorrows, burdens, things that you are 
so constantly wishing different, but which 
you cannot make different. Ah, me ! while, 
like the imprisonment of this prisoner of 
Jesus Christ, there are many and shining 
ameliorations ; while it is most blessedly true 
that things are not nearly as bad as they 
might be, who of us cannot, notwithstanding, 
put out his hands and feel the walls stopping 
him on this side and on that? who of us has 



60 The Brook in the Way, 

not felt the miserable drag of the coupling- 
chain? 

But this is also true, and we would do well 
to remember it. There was a farmer once, 
who said : " I had ploughed around a rock 
in one of my fields for five years, and I had 
broken a mowing-machine knife against it, be- 
sides losing the use of the ground in which it 
lay, — all because I supposed it was such a large 
rock that it would take too much time and 
labor to remove it. So I took a crowbar, in- 
tending to poke around it and find out its size 
once for all ; and it was one of the surprises 
of my life to discover that it was little more 
than two feet long. It was standing on its 
edge, and so light that I could lift it into the 
wagon without help." 

" The first time you really faced your 
trouble you conquered it," one said to him. 

Yes, that is true ; there are a great many 
imprisoning hindrances in life that we only 
think are such, which, if we resolutely face 
them, we shall find not to be such ; but places 
for easy furrow for the plough of our endeavor. 



The Hindered Life. 61 

Yes, that is true. But it is also just as true 
that there are hindering troubles which will 
not down if you do face them, that really are 
like the walls and coupling-chains of this 
prisoner of Jesus Christ. 

That prisoner of Jesus Christ is a type and 
illustration of the most of us. Every life on 
some sides is a ruggedly limited, imprisoned 
life. Therefore, for your help and comfort, I 
want you to look at this prisoner of Jesus 
Christ. And as you look, that you may get 
heart and hope, I want you to notice three 
things about him. 

This is the first thing: This prisoner of 
Jesus Christ is a prisoner by Jesus Christ; 
that is to say, Jesus Christ has a hand in his 
imprisonment. In another place in this same 
epistle this prisoner of Jesus Christ speaks 
about being a prisoner IN the Lord, that is to 
say, though a prisoner, still, as such, in the 
realm of the Lord's activity and direction. 
Because this prisoner has fallen into prison, 
he has not, therefore, fallen out of the grasp 
of the hand of Jesus Christ. 



62 The Brook in the Way. 

Mad mob of Jews almost tearing in pieces 
him who is now the prisoner, there in the 
temple-courts at Jerusalem ; rescue from their 
hands by Lysias, the commander of the Ro- 
man garrison in the Castle of Antonia just by; 
night-journey to Csesarea; vile and itching 
palm of Felix, who will not set this prisoner 
free unless he bribe him, which this prisoner 
will not do ; brave appeal to Caesar as a last 
resort ; stormy waves of Euroclydon ; sal- 
vation from shipwreck on the coast of the 
island of Malta; courteous respect of the 
Roman centurion Junius, wiio had him in 
charge ; the mitigated confinement of his 
hired lodging; over all and through all and 
directing all, the hand of Jesus Christ. This 
prisoner is no shipwrecked orphan cast adrift 
on a rudderless world. He is in the loving 
guardianship of loving hands, which, overrul- 
ing, have brought him to this prison. 

This prisoner of Jesus Christ is worn with a 
mighty toil ; he must rest here in this prison. 

This prisoner of Jesus Christ — impassioned 
preacher of a sect everywhere spoken against 



The Hindered Life. 63 

— must be protected from Jewish fury on the 
one hand, from the persecutions of heathen- 
ism on the other. Awaiting his trial here in 
this prison, the power of the world-wide Ro- 
man Empire is pledged to keep him safe. 

This prisoner of Jesus Christ wanted to tell 
his gospel at the world's centre ; and lo, from 
this prison he can do it most propitiously > for 
all have free access to him, and the Roman 
soldier chained to him hears the great truth 
from his lips ; and, as soldier after soldier is 
detailed to guard him, and is preached to 
lovingly by this preacher, lo, you begin to 
hear of saints in Caesar's household. The 
chance he wanted is the chance his prison 
gives the best. 

This prisoner of Jesus Christ can send 
abroad his letters, if he cannot go to preach 
his sermons ; and he has leisure to write them. 
And he does write them, and scatters them 
broadcast ; and the written word which stands 
and stays takes the place of the spoken word 
which vanishes ; and not only those early and 
struggling Christians, but you and I enter 



64 The Brook in the Way. 

into the vast and precious heritage of those 
written and remaining words. 

There is such a thing as the preventive 
providence of God. Evil is in the world ; 
but God prevents the evil from coming to its 
full and natural bloom. God came to Laban 
the Syrian in a dream of the night, and said 
unto him, " Take heed to thyself that thou 
speak not to Jacob, either good or bad." 

There is such a thing as the directing provi- 
dence of God. Evil is in the world ; but God 
directs the evil acts of men to ends they are 
utterly unable to foresee, and which they by 
no means intend. Said Joseph to his breth- 
ren : " As for you, ye meant evil against me ; 
but God meant it for good, to bring to pass 
as it is this day, to save much people alive." 

There is such a thing as the determinative 
providence of God. Evil is in the world, but 
God says to it: "Thus far shalt thou come 
and no farther, and here shalt thy proud 
waves be stayed." 

And this preventive, directive, determina- 
tive providence had been around this pris- 



The Hindered Life. 65 

oner of Jesus Christ, moulding furious mob 
and stormy waves, and proud and powerful 
Roman government for the best good of this 
prisoner of Jesus Christ, and for the best 
triumph of the noble ends on which his heart 
was set. Because he is a prisoner of Jesus 
Christ, he is a prisoner by Jesus Christ. Jesus 
Christ has had something to do with putting 
him in his prison, and for loving ends. 

Now, if you belong to Jesus Christ, as did 
this prisoner, here is the solidest help and 
comfort for you. You may not see that it is 
really so in your circumstances, as they seem 
just now to you. I doubt if this prisoner of 
Jesus Christ, there in his prison, could at all 
know the immense and vast advantage of his 
imprisonment; but, if you belong to Jesus 
Christ, these hampering, hindering prison- 
walls and coupling-chains have been set 
about you by Jesus Christ and for ends glo- 
rious with the riches of his grace. " I have 
learned," said one, " a new fashion of spelling 
disappointment." Change but a single letter, 
and the word begins to shine with wonderful 

5 



66 The Brook in the Way. 

radiance. In the place of d, put h ; and read 
it His appointment ; and be sure that what 
Love appoints is surely best. So when you 
come to some invincible hindrance, get rest 
before it by this certainty, that, somehow, 
Jesus has had a hand in setting it around 
you, and means by it not a real hindrance, 
but your truest weal. 

But take now a second look at this prisoner 
of Jesus Christ; and notice that he is a pris- 
oner for Jesus Christ. This is what this 
prisoner says about his bonds in another 
place : " According to my earnest expecta- 
tion and my hope that in nothing I shall be 
ashamed ; but that, with all boldness as 
always, so now also Christ shall be magnified 
in my body, whether it be by life or by 
death." 

You see, a great purpose always controls 
circumstances ; it is not controlled by them ; 
it will turn circumstances to its account. 
You have a great love for some one ; the 
bloom and test of love is service; if you love, 
you must serve. This one you love falls 



The Hindered Life, 67 

sick; and then immediately your love for 
him is not baffled by his sickness, but seizes 
at once every chance to serve him in it. You 
smooth his pillow, you gladly do for him 
even menial offices ; if you can do no more, 
you will at least watch by his side to bless 
him with your presence. Your purpose of 
love controls the circumstances around the 
one you love; moulds them into ministries 
somehow of help for him. So here this pris- 
oner is devoted to Jesus Christ, is consumed 
by a great passion for him, and though a 
prisoner, is yet a prisoner for Jesus Christ; 
that is to say, as prisoner he is to do his best 
at serving Jesus Christ. And what can he 
do for him? Range the world for him; 
stand on Mars' Hill at Athens for him ; con- 
front the mob at Ephesus for him ; found a 
church at Corinth for him? No, he could do 
that ; he cannot now. Well, what can he do 
as prisoner for Jesus? He can speak to that 
soldier at his side for Jesus ; and he does it. 
He can write for Jesus ; and in the gloom 
of that captivity bloom beautiful epistles. 



68 The Brook in the Way. 

He can show how a Christian can endure; 
and he does it, — even in the night of his 
imprisonment he is singing songs of joy. 

And will you notice, it is absolutely im- 
possible that this imprisonment deprive him 
of these chances of service. Even the prison 
comes with its rough hands full of opportu- 
nities for service, and cannot help so coming. 

And now, if you belong to Jesus Christ as 
did this prisoner, here again is the solidest 
help and comfort for you. I read once of 
one who, both deaf and dumb, yet loved her 
Lord; she could speak by the sign language, 
in no other way. Said one to her, through 
these signs: "How can you serve Christ?" 
She answered, " I can smile them in." 
Though she could say no audible word for 
Christ, she could stand in the vestibule of the 
church and with kindly welcome greet the 
strangers. And she did it. Who shall not 
say that her welcome was often better than a 
sermon? It is impossible that the narrowest 
prison be not large enough to hold in itself 
some opportunity of service. You feel ham- 



The Hindered Life. 69 

pered, hindered ; you do not have to stretch 
your hands out very far before you feel clos- 
ing around you the prison-walls ; you cannot 
take many steps before some coupling-chain 
tugs at you and holds you back; but even in 
your plight you can find an open door for 
loving service for your Lord, if you will look 
for it. 

And now, will you take but one other look 
at this prisoner of Jesus Christ? He is a 
prisoner of Jesus Christ to become like Jesus. 
This is what this prisoner says about himself: 
" Not as though I had already attained, either 
were already perfect; " and even the great 
Apostle needs the sculpturing hand of disci- 
pline to fashion him into his Lord's likeness. 
I think, if any one will read attentively the 
epistles of the captivity, he must see that the 
great Apostle during this imprisonment grew 
mightily in his consciousness of the great 
grace of God. 

A prisoner by Jesus ; a prisoner for Jesus ; 
a prisoner to become like Jesus. Why, even 
a prison has its shining side. 



jo The Brook in the Way. 

Some practical suggestions : — 

(i) Get out of your prison, if you can. 
Paul did ; he did not stay in it a day longer 
than he need ; its doors opened and he went 
ranging on to Spain to tell his gospel. There 
is no use in tarrying in prisons if you do not 
have to. When the need for some great hin- 
drance in your life passes, get out into the 
fresh air as soon as possible, and be thankful. 

(2) Get the good out of your hindrances. 
They all have lessons for you. They may be 
severe teachers, but they are at heart kindly. 
Wait before them submissively, that they may 
teach you what God would have you learn. 

(3) Instead of moodily complaining of 
hindrances and imprisonments, look around 
in them for the chances of service. They 
surely proffer such. And when you see the 
service go on and do it. 

(4) In our imprisonments, let us think 
more of Jesus Christ than of the enclosing 
walls. It was thus Paul did, and his most 
joyful notes of praise were struck while he 
waited here in prison. 



T 



UNCONSCIOUS INFLUENCE. 
HIS is a fact of which we make much too 



■*■ small account, and yet it is a fact most 
real. 

Mr. Lockhart, in his life of his father-in- 
law, Sir Walter Scott, gives singular and sig- 
nal illustration of the strange and continued 
streaming forth of this unconscious influence. 
It was in Edinburgh, in the month of June, in 
the year 1814. Mr. Lockhart, with several 
others, was dining at the house of a young 
friend of his. They were young men, full of 
the flush and gayety of youth. After the 
fashion of that time, theirs was a carousing 
time. After the dinner, the weather being 
hot, they adjourned to a library which had 
one large window looking northward. There 
the hours went by in gay revel and free talk. 



J2 The Brook in the Way. 

After a time young Lockhart observed a 
shade pass over the countenance of his friend 
and host. He became silent. Lockhart asked 
him if he were sick. " No," he answered, " I 
shall be well enough presently, if you will 
only let me sit where you are, and if you take 
my chair; for there is a confounded hand in 
sight of me through the window here, which 
has often bothered me before, and now it 
won't let me fill my glass with a good-will." 
So attention was drawn to it and the hand 
was pointed out to all. 

" Since we sat down," the young man went 
on to say, " I have been watching it; it fasci- 
nates my eye; it never stops. Page after 
page is finished, thrown on that heap of man- 
script, and still it goes on unwearied ; and so 
it will be till candles are brought in, and God 
knows how long after that. It is the same 
every night. I cannot stand the sight of it 
when I am not at my books." 

" Some stupid, dogged, engrossing clerk," 
suggested somebody. 

"No, boys," answered the young man; " I 



Unconscious Influence. 73 

well know what hand it is; it is Walter 
Scott's." 

That was the tireless, diligent hand that in 
the evenings of three summer weeks wrote 
the last two volumes of " Waverley." That 
hand wrote the volumes, but it did something 
more. It changed a life by the lesson of dil- 
igence it taught. That young man, learning 
that lesson, became subsequently a renowned 
lawyer, — the Honorable William Menzies, 
one of the supreme judges at the Cape of 
Good Hope. 

Thus is it true that we are casting moral 
shadows; thus is it true that there goes 
streaming forth from us unconscious influence. 
It starts unbidden. We may control our con- 
scious influence, but that which is unconscious 
we cannot control. From every point and 
action of our lives it goes forth constantly 
like the sunlight, powerful like gravitation. 
Hinder it we cannot. 

Our unconscious influence is in its quality 
as what we are ourselves. Only the diligent 
hand can unconsciously teach a lesson of 



74 The Brook in the Way. 

diligence. We are all of us unconsciously- 
teaching something. How many and strin- 
gent the obligations grasping us to be noble, 
that our unconscious influence be blessing 
instead of blight. 



THAT WORD " ACCESS." 

r I A HAT is a wonderful word which Paul 
•*- speaks in the Epistle to the Ephesians 
concerning our liberty of approach to God : 
" For through Him, Christ, we both — Jew 
and Gentile — have access by one Spirit unto 
the Father." 

This is not access like that which the an- 
cient Israelite could only know. That was 
access under law, this is access under grace. 
That was the difficult access of ritual, this is 
the open and easy access of gospel. There 
in that guarded access of sacrifice, ceremony, 
washings multiplied, the Israelite was not to 
go further than the court of the Tabernacle, 
save as in the Tabernacle he was represented 
by the priest; and the priest was not to go 
further than the Holy Place of the Tabernacle, 



j6 The Brook in the Way, 

save as he and the people were represented 
in the Holy of Holies by the High Priest; 
and the High Priest might but once a year lift 
the awful curtain, and fall there, not without 
blood, before the mysterious gleaming of the 
Shekinah, and so set forth the fact that there 
was some access, but only of this narrow, hin- 
dered, appalling sort, unto the Divine Father 
for sinful men. 

But look; it hangs there before the Most 
Holy Place. It at once hides it and hinders 
access to it. It is a veil of many folds, vari- 
ously colored and massive with embroidery. 
Behind it, in the ancient Tabernacle and in the 
eldest Temple, stood the ark of God, over- 
swept by the wings of the golden Cherubim, 
and upon which fell, like a fragment of celes- 
tial light, the miraculous Shekinah. And 
though from the later temples the ark was 
gone and the Shekinah vanished, still that 
Most Holy Place remains, and before it falls 
the guarding curtain. 

It is the third hour after mid-day. It is 
the hour when crowds of eager worshippers 



That Word "Access." jy 

throng the Temple-courts. Just now He 
whom the priests have called the troubler of 
Israel is hanging in crucifixion upon Gol- 
gotha. There, within the Holy Place, and 
concealing the Most Holy Place, the special 
shrine and residence of the Divine Father, 
hangs the sacred veil as is its wont. 

But listen, look ! Yonder on Calvary the 
Sufferer shouts victoriously, " It is finished ! " 
His head falls, smitten with death. And then 
the rocks on which the Temple stands are 
quivering in earthquake; and that thick veil, 
as by superhuman hands, is seized and rent 
from top to bottom ; and that Most Holy 
Place, secluded for so many centuries, is flung 
open for the common light and for the com- 
mon gaze and entrance. 

It is in the presence of that rent veil we are 
to read these words of Paul. It is of such 
gracious disclosed access he is speaking. For 
through Christ we both have access by one 
Spirit unto the Father. It is the free, unhin- 
dered access of the gospel ; and if you study 
this word " access," you will find it full of the 



78 The Brook in the Way. 

most precious meaning. It does not signify 
a mere poor liberty of approach, — the chance 
to go in if you want to, but without the music 
of welcome and the certainty of fatherly favor. 
It means really introduction, the bringing in 
to favor. It is access wreathed with welcome. 
It is the access of the boy returned from a 
long and dangerous journey, to the father's 
heart, and to the roof-tree, and the hearth- 
stone, and the family board, and the home- 
stead blessing. It is such access as birds 
have to the summer, as flowers have to the 
sunlight, as your lungs have and mine to the 
invigorating air. It is the peace, and joy, and 
light, and love, and unutterable blessing of the 
open arms and the open heart of the Divine 
Father. 

It is such access as that to which the author 
of the Epistle to the Hebrews incites us when 
he says, " Let us therefore come boldly unto 
the Throne of Grace, that we may obtain mercy 
and find grace to help in time of need." 

It is such access as Polycarp was conscious 
of when the fierce flames of the martyr-fire 



That Word "Access" 79 

which wrapped him round seemed but as 
a cool, moist wind, so rapt and caught up 
was he into the feeling of the close Divine 
Presence. 

It is such access as the mother of the 
Wesleys knew when, pouring out her heart 
to God, she said, " If earnestly and constantly 
to desire Thee, Thy favor, Thy acceptance, 
Thyself, rather than any or all things Thou 
hast created, be to love Thee, I do love 
Thee!' Or as when dying she exclaimed to 
her sons standing round her bed, " Children, 
as soon as I am released, sing a psalm of 
praise to God." 

It is such access as the rude, blaspheming 
Thomas Olivers came into when, becoming 
converted through the preaching of White- 
field, he exclaimed, " I saw God in every- 
thing ; the heavens, the earth, and all therein, 
showed me something of Him; " and who in 
the joy and liberty and mighty mental exhil- 
aration of this access, rose up to write that 
perhaps most resounding and noblest hymn 
in our English language : — 



80 The Brook in the Way. 

" The God of Abraham praise ! 

At whose supreme command 
From earth I rise, and seek the joys 

At His right hand. 
I all on earth forsake, — 

Its wisdom, fame, and power, — 
And Him my only portion make, 

My shield and tower." 

It is such access as that of which Edwards 
tells, " which he knows not how to express 
otherwise than by a calm sweet abstraction 
of soul sweetly conversing with Christ, and 
rapt and swallowed up in God." 

Ah, if we would use more this access, if 
we would tread oftener its open way into the 
waiting and welcoming heart of the Divine 
Father, with what refreshed and vigorous 
souls should we come forth to bear the bur- 
dens of our lives and to set strong hands to 
the tasks given us to do. 



WALKING BY FAITH. 

nPHERE was Peter going firmly forth upon 
-*• the rough and yielding waves. And the 
way was smooth before his feet; and the 
waters were rock beneath them. For his eye 
was fixed on Christ. He was intent only to 
reach Him. Since Christ had said " Come," 
he was sure Christ would support him in the 
coming. Thus by faith he walked in such a 
wonderful and conquering way. 

Yet he sank sadly and so soon. And as 
Christ reaches forth to catch him, He ex- 
claims, " O thou of little faith, wherefore 
didst thou doubt?" and in that word doubt 
we may find the entire reason for Peter's frus- 
tration. It is a word singularly suggestive. 
It means to turn irresolutely in two direc- 
tions, to waver, looking now this way — now 

6 



82 The Brook in the Way. 

that. The whole picture of the sinking, 
failing man is in it. 

Somehow between Peter and Christ the 
waves have dashed themselves. Peter has 
caught sight of their foaming crests striking 
at him angrily. He begins to think not of 
Christ, but of the storm; not of his support 
but of his danger. Thus he can do nothing 
but sink. He must have gone like lead to 
the bottom, had it not been for the out- 
stretched hand of Christ. 

Peter's eye wavered on the billows, — that 
was the trouble. Had he but kept it on the 
conquering Christ, he might have walked 
with Him triumphant over all that stormy 
sea. You see it was not needful that Peter 
be overcome, even with water for a footway 
and amid such a storm. Nor can it be need- 
ful that we be overcome. 

"Yes, you must be," many say. "You 
can only be a sinking Christian at the very 
best. You must all the time expect sub- 
merging." 

Why? Suppose I believe toward victory 



Walking by Faith. 83 

instead of toward defeat ; suppose I keep my 
faith fastened upon the Master of the waves; 
suppose by constant consecration I let no 
blinding spray of trouble, even, hide the 
vision of my Lord, — can I sink then? Nay, 
verily. It is possible to walk the waves by 
faith. 



THE VALUE OF MORAL PLAN FOR 

LIFE. 

MORAL plan for life provides against 
contingencies. 

There are people who live but from hand 
to mouth. The daily earning is consumed 
by the daily necessity. Nothing is laid up 
for a rainy day. Sickness, or loss of situa- 
tion, or some such contingency, finds them 
stranded. They have no reserve of pecu- 
niary ability to fall back upon. Such people 
are in a kind of slavery, sometimes needful, 
often needless. 

Now, what happens on the pecuniary and 
physical side of life happens frequently on 
the moral side of it. Moral contingencies 
spring up ; unexpected moral questions are 
constantly occurring. Shall I do this or 
that? Shall I enter into this or that busi- 



The Value of Moral Plan for Life, 85 

ness? Shall I allow myself in this or that 
pleasure? Nobody can live long and not be 
confronted by such questions. The child 
meets them at its school, the woman in her 
household, the man in his business. Fre- 
quently the decision of the question is diffi- 
cult. Sometimes one is thrown before them 
into very distressing doubtfulness. There is 
a large realm of casuistry lying about each 
life. 

But now, a life organized about a moral 
plan holds in itself provision for such contin- 
gency, just as a balance at the bank makes a 
man sure in the presence of unlooked-for 
expenditure. 

Many people live morally, as many do pe- 
cuniarily, in no beforehand fashion. They 
are prepared for nothing which may occur. 
They mean well, but they do not do well; 
inclination draws them here, then yonder; 
before they know it they are involved in all 
sorts of complications. 

If, however, one but hold within himself 
an ordered moral plan for life, such ques- 



86 The Brook in the Way, 

tions are frequently at once decided simply 
by the presence of the plan. Does this mat- 
ter, or does it not, consist with the rule of 
life which I have determined shall control 
me? If it does not, no; if it does, yes: the 
plan analyzes and settles the thing for you. 
So, while others are hesitating, you are strong 
in decision; you are in the serene light; you 
are ready for contingencies ; you can afford 
to live freely, bravely. 

This is Christ's suggestion of moral plan : 
Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His 
righteousness. " 



THE CROSS THE TRUE POINT OF 
VIEW. 

ONE'S point of view is a great deal. I rode 
into the Vale of Chamouny, along the 
pass Tete-Noir. The way led directly under 
the shadow of Mont Blanc. Grand as the 
sight is, there is a kind of disappointment in 
it. Mont Blanc does not seem a monarch. 
You gaze u oon its white dome, and you can- 
not see that it is heaved most loftily ; other 
peaks look higher. Your point of view is 
wrong. 

But leave the Vale of Chamouny, and wind 
along the road a dozen miles, until you reach 
the little French town of Sallanches, and 
then look back. The memory of that sight 
can never leave me. The day was exquisite. 
The light shot through the translucent air 
hindered by scarce a shred of vapor; behind 



88 The Brook in the Way. 

me gleamed the mighty mountain-range, as 
white and beautiful as the pearly gates of 
heaven; and, shooting from its midst, Mont 
Blanc, crowned now with its real altitude, 
dwarfing utterly all the other mountains, 
gathering them like little children under its 
protection, rising heavenward itself until it 
seemed as though it would detain the sun, 
even, careering through the skies. Here at 
Sallanches I stood at the right place to get 
a right vision of Mont Blanc. What was 
distorted in other places was in its real rela- 
tions there. 

Now, there stood by the cross of'Jesus, his 
mother and his mother's sister, Mary the 
wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene ; and 
a sad standing-place it was for them, and 
with its awful sadness then altogether un- 
relieved. 

At best, death is something terrible. 
Smooth the pillow of your friend, your 
child; speak in whispers, lest a louder voice 
should scare away the failing life ; move with 
muffled tread ; stand alert for the least sign 



The Cross the True Point of View, 89 

from the sufferer, that you may give him 
ministry; by soothing word and soothing 
help and soothing medicine, smooth that 
passage to the mysterious change ; and then, 
though you have done everything the inge- 
nuity of affection can suggest, death is some- 
thing terrible. Even the place of the softest 
and the sweetest death is a place of sadness, 
which sadness the comfort that you have had 
a chance to do your best and utmost for the 
sufferer cannot put away. 

But to Mary and these other loving women 
standing with her, there was denied all op- 
portunity of ministry. That cross barred 
human help. The thrust of thorn and thrust 
of nail, the jests of gambling executioners, 
the taunts of the unpitying multitude, — 
these things were there ; but there was no 
path for the feet of loving service. 

How the mother-heart of Mary must have 
bled then ! How the words of Simeon must 
have come back to her, which he spoke 
when he blessed the Holy Child years back 
in the temple : " This child is set for the 



90 The Brook in the Way, 

fall and rising again of many in Israel, and 
for a sign which shall be spoken against; 
yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own 
soul also " ! How she must have felt now 
the stabbing of that prophetic sword ! Never 
was mother so stricken ; never was human 
heart so pierced, save only the heart of her 
suffering Son hanging there before her on 
that cross. 

But Mary understood the meaning of that 
cross she stood by better afterwards, when 
the triumph of the Resurrection and Ascen- 
sion had fallen on it. In that upper room 
in Jerusalem, when the Spirit had come, I 
am sure she went back to stand by its side 
in memory with an altogether different feel- 
ing. For then that cross must have become 
to her what it has since been to sin-smitten, 
troubled, bewildered, questioning men and 
women, — the true point of view for God and 
life and destiny ; the place where one sees 
the moral facts of life in their right relations ; 
the spot where life's deepest questions find 
their answer, and where life's heaviest bur- 



The Cross the True Point of View. 91 

dens get release and help. What Sallanches 
is to Mont Blanc, that is the cross to human 
history and human life ; it is the point of 
view from which to get real vision. In the 
Palace of Justice at Rome, people are some- 
times taken into a strangely painted chamber. 
There are frescos on the ceiling and around 
upon the walls, and mosaics upon the floor. 
But those forms and lines and colors seem all 
grotesque and singularly inexplicable. You 
cannot get them into harmony: you cannot 
discover the perspective ; the whole thing is 
a bewilderment. But there is one spot in 
that room, standing upon which every line 
falls into harmony; where the reaches of 
perspective open, and the meaning of pic- 
tured roof and wall and pavement is all dis- 
closed. At that point, and at that point 
only, can you see the frescos rightly. 

So, mazy with bewilderment is human his- 
tory and human life. You can see nothing 
truly, you must see everything in distortion, 
until you stand here with these women at the 
cross. That is the place whence God means 



92 The Brook in the Way. 

you to look at things. Says one of the rulers 
in German literature : " In all my study of 
the ancient times I have always felt the want 
of something, and it was not till I knew our 
Lord that all was clear to me ; with Him, 
there is nothing that I am not able to solve." 
Let us see what light this cross of our Lord 
casts in but a single direction. Standing at 
the cross, you may certainly see the Divine 
sympathy with human suffering. How path- 
etic that, among the latest poems of the dead 
Longfellow, called "The Chamber over the 
Gate : " — 

Is it so far from thee, 
Thou canst no longer see, 
In the Chamber over the Gate, 
That old man desolate, 
Weeping and wailing sore, 
For his son, who is no more ? 
O Absalom, my son ! 

Is it so long ago 
That cry of human woe 
From the walled city came, 
Calling on his dear name, 
That it has died away 
In the distance of to-day ? 
O Absalom, my son 1 



The Cross the True Point of View, 93 

There is no far nor near, 
There is neither there nor here, 
There is neither soon nor late 
In that Chamber over the Gate ; 
Nor any long ago 
To that cry of human woe, 
O Absalom, my son ! 



From the ages that are past 
The voice comes like a blast, 
Over seas that wreck and drown, 
Over tumult of traffic and town ; 
And from ages yet to be 
Come the echoes back to me, 
O Absalom, my son 1 

Somewhere at every hour 
The watchman on the tower 
Looks forth, and sees the fleet 
Approach of the hurrying feet 
Of messengers, that bear 
The tidings of despair. 

O Absalom, my son ! 

He goes forth from the door 
Who shall return no more. 
With him our joy departs ; 
The light goes out in our hearts ; 
In the Chamber over the Gate 
We sit disconsolate. 

O Absalom, my son ! 



94 Unconscious Influence. 

That 't is a common grief 
Bringeth but slight relief; 
Ours is the bitterest loss, 
Ours is the heaviest cross ; 
And forever the cry will be," 
" Would God I had died for thee, 
O Absalom, my son ! " 

Yes, the chamber over the gate is built in 
other cities than Mahanaim, and in other 
years than in that distant one in which David's 
heart was smitten. It is built in every city. 
Its sad bewailings break into every year, into 
every day. And very surely you and I must 
sometimes enter that chamber, and find our 
heart breaking, too. This touch of suffering 
is sure to make the whole world kin. 

And nobody ever stands in that chamber 
over the gate, smitten there and crushed and 
crying, that he does not find calling in his 
heart an unfathomable hunger for the Divine 
sympathy. What he wants to be sure of is 
that God knows about it, that God cares 
about it, that God feels about it. Even 
though one be an atheist, is his heart pierced 
with the pang of this hunger. " Have you 



The Cross the True Point of View. 95 

ever seen," another asks, " or perhaps made 
one of a party of people who were going to 
explore some deep, dark cavern, — the Mam- 
moth Cave of Kentucky, or the Catacombs 
of Rome? They all stand out in the sunlight; 
and the attendants, who know the journey 
they are going to make, pass round among 
them, and put into the hands of each a 
lighted candle. How useless it seems. How 
pale and colorless the little flame appears in 
the gorgeous flood of sunlight. But the pro- 
cession moves along. One after another en- 
ters the dark cavern's mouth. One after 
another loses the splendor of daylight. In 
the hands of one after another the feeble 
candle-flame comes out bright in the dark- 
ness, and by-and-by they are all walking in 
the dark holding fast their candles as if they 
were their very life, — totally dependent now 
upon what seemed so useless half an hour 
ago." 

Before a man gets into that chamber over 
the gate, while he stands outside in the sun- 
light of prosperity and of an unbroken 



g6 The Brook in the Way. 

home, he may have no special concern about 
God's sympathy for him. But when he must 
go — as some time he surely must — into the 
blackness of that darkness, why then how he 
longs to get grip on even some little candle- 
flicker of certainty that the thought and help 
of God is with him in the darkness. 

And now the question comes, Where can 
we get it? From nature? Oh, if we had no 
other source to learn of the Divine sympathy 
but nature, what could men do? What could 
men do in the presence of those great ele- 
mental forces which are " stern as fate, abso- 
lute as tyranny, merciless as death ; which 
are too vast to praise, too inexorable to propi- 
tiate ; which have no ear for prayer, no heart 
for sympathy, no arm to save? " What could 
men do with nothing to gaze on in their grief 
but these? What do gravitation and chemi- 
cal affinity and the stellar spaces and heat 
and light and electricity care for us in our 
chamber over the gate, shut in with our dead 
Absalom? Did you ever notice that the sun- 
shine was any less gorgeous when it fell on 



The Cross the True Point of View. 97 

the grave heaped over the one you love ; or 
that the flowers bloomed there in any ten- 
derer color? 

Ah, you must stand at the cross to see 
God's care and sympathy. Stand any other 
where, and you can never see it. Stand there, 
and, thank God, you cannot help the seeing 
it. For it is God in humanity who hangs 
upon that cross and reddens its rough wood 
with His own blood. It is God, bearing OUR 
sorrows, who is hanging there. It is God 
hanging there in infinite self-sacrifice, to let 
us surely see He sympathizes and loves and 
cares. Nature tells us of His power; but the 
cross tells of His love. 

" The very God, think, Abib, dost thou think ? 
So the All-great were the All-loving too ; 
So through the thunder comes a human voice, 
Saying, O heart I made, a Heart beat here. 
Face my hands fashioned, see it in myself ; 
Thou hast no strength, nor mayest conceive of mine, 
But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 
And thou must love Me, who hast died for thee." 



A USE OF THE HUMANITY OF 
CHRIST. 

TT makes God intelligible. " I am that 
■*- which has been, and which is, and which 
is to be, and my veil no mortal hath yet 
drawn aside," was the legend describing God 
sculptured upon the pediment of one of the 
most famous temples of ancient Egypt. It is 
full of that undying longing in human hearts 
to find out God. It is full, too, of that baf- 
fled feeling which must always haunt a merely 
human search. Who art Thou then, O Lord? 
has been the question of the ages. Of Thy 
glory the heavens speak. Thou fillest the 
spaces with Thy presence. Thou makest the 
universe Thy temple. From Thee all things 
proceed ; to Thee all things at last return. 
But who art Thou ? And back from the im- 
measurable silence there ever came to man 
but the tantalizing echo of his own question. 



A Use of the Humanity of Christ, 99 

Who by searching can find out God? Can 
you measure the distances between the stars 
with an inch rule? Can you vanquish the 
night's darkness by the flash of a glow-worm? 
Can what is finite stretch itself to the com- 
prehension of the infinite? Who by search- 
ing can find out God? If God tarry there 
hidden in the recesses of His own Infinity, I 
can never find Him out, and my heart's hun- 
ger is but smitten into deeper famine. But 
if God descend to my finite level, if He stoop 
within the range of my narrower capacity, if 
He stand before me in my human nature, a 
being intelligible to me in a brother's shape, 
if He look upon me out of human eyes, and 
grasp me with human hands, and speak to 
me in such language as my finiteness must 
use, — then the veil which hides Him, He has 
drawn aside. Then the longing in me to know 
God is met and answered. 

In Rome there is a wonderful fresco by 
Guido, called the Aurora. It glows upon a 
lofty ceiling. Standing on the pavement, and 
looking upward at it, your neck stiffens, your 



ioo The Brook in the Way. 

head grows dizzy, the figures get mazy and 
indistinct. But the owner of the palace has 
placed a broad mirror near the floor. You 
may sit down before that, and study the won- 
drous picture reflected in it. There is no 
longer stretch and strain and dizziness and 
indistinctness and inability. This divine, yet 
human Christ is the mirror of Deity for us. 
He is the express image of the Godhead 
standing with us in our humanity. He inter- 
prets God to our longing hearts. In Him 
God becomes intelligible. There is some- 
thing vast and vague and difficult to grasp 
in the name and thought of God Almighty. 
But the Lord Jesus — God in our own nature 
— one like ourselves, a child as we have 
been, and showing us what childhood ought 
to be in that home at Nazareth ; carrying 
the burdens of a public life as we must, and 
showing us how to carry them ; standing in 
the place of temptation as we must, ' and 
pointing out the method of our victory ; lend- 
ing His presence to our feasts, and telling us 
therefore, that feasts are rightful even in this 



A Use of the Humanity of Christ. 101 

sad world ; going with His sweet speech and 
tender touch to our funerals, and so letting 
us know that our worst grief is within His 
knowledge, and since it brings His presence, 
that grief even can become a most blessed 
sacrament; going before us into death, and 
then flinging the light of His resurrection 
back all along the dreaded way, — our Lord 
Jesus, how loving, how long-suffering, how 
sacrificing, and yet how right and just; our 
Lord Jesus, — not distant from us, not apart 
from us as by chasm impassable, but close to 
us, braided into our human relations through 
this human nature which He shares with us. 
Oh, He is not vast and vague and difficult 
to grasp. He gives reality to our thoughts 
of God, for He is God, stooping to brother- 
hood with us, that our little thoughts may 
get on Him some veritable and valuable 
hold. 



LEAVING THE FISHING NETS. 

CONSECRATION is the first step in a 
real Christianity. In Rome there stands 
the Pantheon. It used to be a temple for all 
the gods. Round its circular sides were 
niches in which were placed images of the 
various deities worshipped by the various 
nations which Rome had conquered. That 
temple was a place of blended worships. 
Mr. Bayne tells us that when adherents to the 
Lord Jesus began to start rumors of the new 
religion, the Roman Senate passed a decree 
consecrating a niche in this temple for all 
the gods to Him. But Christ enters no Pan- 
theon. The whole temple must be His, or 
He will have none of it. 

It is in such an attitude, precisely, that 
Christ stands at the door of every heart. He 
is its rightful Lord. He will share dominion 



Leaving the Fishing Nets. 103 

with no other. The heart must yield all to 
Christ, or it has not yielded at all. Every 
whit must be given, or none is given. Christ 
must be the unquestioned owner of the soul. 
In Him must its affections centre. To Him 
must its powers be dedicated. Everything 
which gathers round it — time, position, learn- 
ing, influence, money — must gather round 
Him who is the soul's deeper centre. Said 
Paul, " I am the slave of Christ." No less 
word than that can express the depth and 
fulness and thoroughness of the consecration 
Christ demands. 

" An entire consecration embraces three 
things — being, doing, suffering — that we 
must be willing to be, to do, to suffer, all 
that Christ requires. This embraces repu- 
tation, friends, property, time. It includes 
body, mind, and soul. These are to be used 
only where and when Christ requires, and 
only as He requires." 

The seal of the Baptist Missionary Union 
tells the truth admirably. There is an altar, 
from which ascends the smoke of sacrifice. 



104 Th e Brook in the Way, 

There is a plough, and leaning against the 
plough, a yoke. Beside the two stands an ox ; 
and this is the motto written underneath : 
" Ready for either," — to burn on the altar as 
a sacrifice, to toil in the furrow with the yoke 
and plough. But say the word, and either 
shall be done, O Lord. Neither myself nor 
my service is my own — all is Thine. 

Such a consecration is the first step in 
Christianity. If you hesitate here, the Chris- 
tian way shuts up against you adamantine 
gates. Where the gates open, self must die. 

Said Jesus to the fishermen, " Follow me, 
and I will make you fishers of men." Mark 
the record : " And straightway they left their 
nets, and followed Him." Notice, too, that 
just when Jesus spoke they were casting their 
nets into the sea, — were in the act of fishing, 
were probably just beginning their daily toil. 
Never mind : the nets were dropped ; there 
w r as instant obedience. They left their nets 
and followed Him. 

No man can be a Christian who has not, 
in effect, left his fishing-nets. They are 



Leaving the Fishing Nets, 105 

Christ's, not his. If Christ permit him to go 
on with his fishing, well; he will do it for 
Christ's sake. If the nets must rot upon the 
shore, be it so ; they are Christ's, let them 
rot. 

There never can be a real following which 
does not begin in a consecration coincident 
with the entire circle of one's being. 



THE DIVINE DEFENCE. 

TN the twenty- third Psalm the sweet singer 
-*■ sings, amid the valley-of-death shade, 
" Thy rod comforts me." 

Get a true idea of this word translated 
" rod," and at once a beautiful meaning of 
Divine defence comes out. The word means, 
literally, club, or mace. It is a great stout 
bludgeon, — a most formidable tool of de- 
fence. It was made, usually, of the tough 
wood of the oak. Swelling out from the 
handle was a great, thick, rounded head. 
This head was often further armed by the 
driving into it of heavy iron nails. Grasped 
by a strong hand, and wielded by a strong 
arm, the bludgeon, or mace, as you can see, 
would be a most strong weapon with which 
the shepherd could beat off assailants of the 
flock. 



The Divine Defence, 107 

And the shepherd had need enough to use 
this mace, for his flock had many enemies. 
Fierce Syrian bears and powerful hunting 
leopards prowled often through those valleys 
amid the Judean mountains, called in the 
poetic language .of the Hebrews, valleys of 
the shadow of death. Hyenas shrieked, and 
jackals yelled through them. The cobra, 
and also the cerastes, or horned viper, would 
often dart up through the rocks of the wilder- 
ness, and strike suddenly at some part of 
the shepherd's flock. There were also, lurk- 
ing about, great yellow vipers, and whitish- 
yellow scorpions. And, circling through 
the. air, and hovering over the flock, and 
vigilant for a chance to swoop on some tender 
lamb and bear it off to some eyrie on the 
mountain heights, wheeled with strong flight, 
and watched with keen eye, the immense and 
formidable lammergeier, or vulture. Besides, 
as well, banditti threatened, — the Bedouins, 
their hand against every man and every man's 
hand against them; these rangers of the 
wilderness, ambuscaders amid its rocks, who 



108 The Brook in the Way. 

lived by pillage, were a constant menace to 
the shepherd and his flock. He had need 
enough, then, for his stalwart club, or mace, 
which in the Psalm is translated " rod." He 
must smite at bears and leopards, hyenas and 
jackals with it. He must dash down hissing 
serpents with it; he must beat back sharp- 
taloned, vast-winged vultures with it; he 
must stand between his flock and prowling, 
predatory banditti with it. This mace, in the 
shepherd's grip, was his flock's defence. 

So the singer in the Psalm takes up the 
figure and sings how strong, glad comfort is 
in his heart (though he must walk amid 
the valley of the death-shade) because the 
Jehovah-Shepherd's mace is his defence. 
And now what source of comfort here ; the 
Shepherd-Lord defends ! He defends by the 
great and masterful mace of His atonement. 
There is no need that I detail the dangers 
threatening, — the prowling, predatory world, 
flesh, devil ; the smiting penalties of sin. But 
between God's saints and the dangers crowd- 
ing around them is the mace of the Lord's 



The Divine Defence. 109 

atonement. What a comfort for them in the 
fact that this is ,their defence. 

I freely confess I cannot understand the 
force of that objection so often made against 
our Lord's atonement, that it is out of the 
analogy of nature, and contrary to the order 
of things, and therefore cannot be believed, 
and so cannot yield comfort. On the other 
hand, it seems to me the one thing which fits 
precisely in with the analogy of things ; it is 
precisely that which was to be expected from 
a loving God. 

Did you read, sometime since, in the news- 
papers, of brave Kate Shelley? On the 6th 
of July, 1 88 1, just as the sun went down, a 
most devastating storm of wind and rain 
smote the country around the town of Boone, 
Iowa. In an hour's time the Des Moines 
River rose six feet. Before the fierce force 
of the wind many buildings fell. Kate was 
looking out of the window of her home, and 
saw, through the darkness and storm, a loco- 
motive headlight. In a second it dropped 
suddenly from sight, and Kate Shelley knew 



no Th2 Brook in the Way. 

the Honey-Creek bridge was gone, and that 
that train had plunged into the emptiness. 
There was no one at home except her mother 
and her little brother. She herself was barely- 
turned sixteen. 

She knew the evening express-train was 
due in a little time, and if it were not warned 
of the destroyed bridge over Honey Creek, 
it would surely go plunging down into the 
abyss. She hurried out into the storm. She 
gained the railroad track, and fast as the 
force of the terrible wind would let her, she 
struggled on toward Moingona, — a station 
about a mile from Honey Creek. To reach 
Moingona she must cross a trestle-bridge 
over the Des Moines River, standing unshel- 
tered in the teeth of the storm, and fully five 
hundred feet in length. 

She crept upon the bridge. The wind flew 
* at her, the rain dashed at her, the lightning 
flashed around her, the thunder seemed to 
tread the very timbers to which she clung 
and shake them. She almost lost her balance. 
She just escaped falling through into the 



The Divine Defence. in 

black, raging waters. It was pitch dark. 
The only light was the lightning's lurid flash, 
revealing for an instant the slippery timbers, 
and the seething, dashing, roaring flood 
below. Not a moment was to be lost. Brave 
Kate Shelley crept steadily on. She gained 
the ground on the other side. She sped to 
the station. She gasped out her story. She 
fell unconscious. Telegrams flashed along 
the wires, " Honey-Creek bridge is gone." 
The express train, crowded with men and 
women and little children, dashing on, was 
stopped in time. Brave Kate Shelley had 
saved them all. 

And now, as you think of her crawling 
along upon the slippery timbers of that 
trestle-bridge, amid the pitchy blackness of 
the night, and the flash of the lightning, the 
roar of the thunder, and against the savage 
fury of the hurricane, do you not see how 
she did, really vicariously, take upon herself 
all the terrible danger threatening that 
crowded train, and uprearing the mace of 
her devotion between it and its hazard, did 



ii2 The Brook in the Way, 

defend from the hovering, angry peril, the 
great train? 

It was not out of reason that she should do 
it; it was in accordance with the noblest, 
sublimest, even celestial reason. 

Why should men object to that in the great 
atonement to which they do not object in a 
case like this? It is true, indeed, that this 
taking upon herself all the danger of that 
great train by Kate Shelley is but the faintest 
possible type and shadow of that reality when 
the Good Shepherd bore our sins in His own 
body on the tree. But now, between those 
who trust Him and the death and danger of 
their sin, the Shepherd-Lord uprears the 
mighty mace of His complete atonement; 
and how perfectly does He defend them ! 

Here is constant comfort for the threader 
of the Valley of the Shadow of Death ; over 
him is lifted the defending mace of the Divine 
atonement. 



INABILITY. 

" "R"^"^ wnat are these among so many?" 

■" The disciples, there in the wilderness, 
before the hungry multitude, uttering this 
real cry of a real inability, are an exact pict- 
ure of the moral plight of every one of us. 

What is all we can do — though we be to 
the utmost strained — in the presence of the 
towering moral demands upon us? 

In certain realms, and within certain limits, 
man has, and has rightly, the consciousness 
of a very great and glorious ability. To this 
consciousness of ability, in these certain 
realms and within these certain limits, science 
in our day is mightily ministering. As never 
before, man feels himself, and rightfully, the 
crowned and efficient master of nature. 

There, at Thun, they have reared a statue 
to Copernicus, and sculptured a legend on it, 
truly telling the magnificent ability of man on 



ii4 The Brook in the Way. 

some sides : Terrae Motor, Solis Coeliqne Sta~ 
tor, " The Mover of the Earth, the Establisher 
of the Sun and Heaven." Copernicus was 
able for that. He did, and could, flash the 
light of science into the dark and, until then, 
entangled mazes of the spheres. He did 
show that the earth was not the steady centre 
of the solar system, as man had thought it ; 
but that it was only a small and whirling 
attendant upon the stable sun. 

In this realm of scientific discovery Co- 
pernicus was possessed of vast ability, and 
multitudes of men have, with him, in this 
sense, been able too. 

But when you pass from the realm scien- 
tific into the realm moral, then immediately 
Copernicus, and all other men as well, are be- 
reft of ability. As true as that inscription is 
on his statue at Thun, telling of the great and 
noble power which he could wield in the 
realm of scientific knowledge and discovery, 
so true is that other inscription, which he 
asked to have written on his monument in 
the church at Thun, — so accurately does it 



Inability. 1 1 5 

set forth man's moral weakness and inability: 
" I crave not the favor which Paul received, 
nor the grace wherewith Thou didst pardon 
Peter; I only pray for that which Thou didst 
bestow from the cross upon the thief." 

Copernicus was so able, in one direction, 
that he could see into and seize the mechan- 
ism of the planets careering in their orbits 
through the spaces. But Copernicus was 
consciously so unable in the realm which has 
to do with the Divine law and the Divine re- 
quirements that he could be, there, but a 
humble suppliant upon the benignant grace 
of God. 

Now, the danger is that, because man feels 
himself possessed of such ability in the one 
realm, he will imagine himself strong with an 
equal ability in the other. But in this last 
and greater moral realm man is unable. 
Concerning the best that he can ever do in 
this moral realm, there is left for him but this 
despairing cry of a present inability, " But 
what are these among so many? " 

As Christ was the only hope and help for 



n6 The Brook in the Way, 

these disciples, helpless themselves in the 
emergency of that hungry multitude, so in the 
moral realm of the searching demands upon 
him of the exact and awful law, man must 
turn to Christ. By his sin man has rendered 
himself unable to keep that law ; but his glori- 
ous hope and help is — Christ is the end of 
the law for righteousness to every one that 
believeth. 



THE SUCCEEDING THING. 

HPOO much is our Christianity anxious 
-"*- about its beginnings, and careless about 
its subsequent growth and reach. Too much, 
comparatively, is there a straining after con- 
version; too little, comparatively, is there 
endeavor after succeeding maturity and ripe- 
ness. We are all the time seeking by various 
religious appliances just to get people out of 
Egypt. We are all the time too unconcerned 
as to whether these people go on to conquer 
Canaan for the Lord. The continual cry and 
call from pulpit and from Sabbath-school is 
" Come to Christ," — as it ought to be ; but 
the call having been answered, the too great 
tendency is, both toward ourselves and those 
around us, to think duty done, and to forget 
that now, having come to Jesus, the reign of 
Jesus is to be extended inwardly over the en- 
tire soul, and outwardly over the entire life. 



n8 The Brook in the Way. 

But Canaan reached was not Canaan con- 
quered. The deliverance from Egypt, and 
the wilderness discipline, had but brought the 
children of Israel up to the rugged duty of 
the conquest. When they stood on the bor- 
ders of the promised land, they had but 
begun their work. 

What is conversion? It is aptly symbol- 
ized in the earlier history of the Israelites. 
They had left Egypt; they had passed 
through the wilderness ; they had reached 
Canaan. And so a converted man has turned 
away from the Egyptian tyranny of sin ; has 
passed through a longer or shorter wilderness * 
of doubt and struggle ; has reached the be- 
ginning of the Canaan life in Jesus. But the 
man converted is by no means the man sancti- 
fied. He has turned toward Jesus ; he has 
not yet conquered for Jesus. All the deliver- 
ance and discipline of conversion but brings 
him up to this grand duty of the conquest of 
the self for Christ. 

For this converted soul is a soul preoccu- 
pied notwithstanding. Hostile aliens have 



The Succeeding Thing. 119 

long had residence within him. Yet, through 
all his borders dwell Hittites, Amorites, 
Ammonites, Midianites, Perizzites. They are 
not willingly dispossessed. They do not at 
once surrender their fortresses and yield their 
sway. Pride is in the soul. By that I do 
not mean a lofty self-respect, disdaining 
meanness ; I mean a swollen arrogance which 
will accept no higher reason than its own, 
which is complacent with conceit even at 
the bar of conscience. And Vanity is in 
the soul, which, as a sponge sucks water, 
is always absorbing praise, whether it be 
deserved or not, anxious about seeming 
rather than about being. And Jealousy is 
in the soul, breaking with God's great truth 
of brotherhood ; shooting darts at others ; 
greedy of the good which others gain. And 
Covetousness is in the soul, narrow, unpity- 
ing, prompting to dishonest courses. And 
Passionateness is in the soul, flaming forth 
with unholy fury; and Discontent, petulant 
evermore, because not treated better. And 
Fear is in the soul, feeding itself on unbelief; 



120 The Brook in the Way, 

and Bad Habit too, building its prisons and 
forging its chains. And hosts of other aliens. 
These have possessed the soul, and are stand- 
ing ranked against the entrance and the 
victory of the new life. 

But listen, as Paul shall tell us the meaning 
of the Christian warfare : " Casting down 
imaginations and every high thing that ex- 
alteth itself against the knowledge of God, 
and bringing into captivity every thought to 
the obedience of Christ!' And this is the 
thing which the spiritual Israelite must do. 
Standing with conversion behind him, and 
with this great duty at his front, he must dis- 
possess these aliens altogether ; he must make 
thorough conquest of himself for Jesus. 

While we cannot be too anxious about the 
beginning of the new life in any soul, let us 
not forget the equal need of its advance and 
gathering power and undiminished triumph. 
That only is a genuine Conversion which goes 
on into Transformation ! This is the succeed- 
ing thing. 



SCRIPTURAL FAITH. 

11 The just shall live by faith.'''' 

SEEK to get at the meaning of this great 
duty which is so much insisted on in 
Scripture. As faith has been analyzed, it has 
been found to consist of three elements: — 

First, — The Intellectual Element. 

We are told in the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
" He that cometh to God must believe that 
He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that 
diligently seek Him ; " and again, in James, 
" Thou believest there is one God, thou doest 
well; the devils also believe, and tremble." 
In order that there be faith, there must be 
something upon which the intellect may lay 
hold. If I say I have faith in God, I must 
be intellectually sure there is a God. So, 
as a beginning of my faith, I must have a 
reason for my faith. It is impossible that 



122 The Brook in the Way. 

my faith stand on nothing. It is impossible 
that I make a jump into vacancy and call 
that faith. I use a wrong word ; that is not 
faith, — it is credulity. 

It is often said there is an opposition be- 
tween faith and reason. That cannot be true, 
for intellectual reason must be the ground of 
faith. As a pedestal on which faith is to 
stand, there must always be a because. 

I have faith that the steamer lying at the 
dock will carry me safely across the sea to 
Europe ; and I have faith in her because 
there are a multitude of becauses for my faith, 
— her buoyancy, her strength, the power of 
her engines, the trustworthiness of her crew, 
the intelligence and the skill of her captain. 
Standing on these becauses, I rise into the 
belief that I could make a safe voyage in her. 
Otherwise I could not have that belief. 
Otherwise my faith would have nothing to 
stand upon. 

So with a faith toward God; there must 
be becauses under its feet. I must be intel- 
lectually certain that God is. I must have 



Scriptural Faith. 123 

the devils' certainty that there is one God, 
anyway. There must, at least, be this intel- 
lectual, reasonable element in it; that is the 
first thing. 

But there is a second element in faith by 
which the just live ; that is — The Emotional 
Element. 

If my faith go no further than simply an 
intellectual assent that God is, then I have 
gone no further than the devils' faith. I 
have not reached the faith by which the just 
live. I must not only be intellectually con- 
vinced that God is, and that He has made 
provision for my needs in the grace that is 
in Jesus Christ, but I must be so emotionally 
convinced that my heart shall consent to 
Him and to His provision. The assent of the 
intellect must pass on into the consent of the 
heart. Thus I do not simply believe that 
because the steamer is what she is I might 
make a safe voyage to Europe in her, but I 
am willing to stand upon her deck and in- 
trust myself to her buoyancy, strength, trust- 
worthy crew, skilful captain. 



124 Th e Brook in the Way. 

I have now taken a step far ahead of what 
James calls the faith of devils. I do not 
simply, by the head, assent to the fact that 
there is one God ; I am willing with my heart 
to consent to that God as my Ruler, Father, 
and Provider of grace in Jesus Christ. 

But there is a third element in this faith 
by which the just live, that may not be lost 
sight of, — The Voluntary Element. 

Let me again allude to my illustration. 
Because of the buoyancy, strength, and navi- 
gating intelligence in care of the steamer, I 
have arrived at the intellectual faith that she 
could carry me safely to Europe. That is 
the first step. Because of this intellectual 
faith, this faith founded on reasons, I make 
consent emotionally with my heart, and I say 
I am willing to intrust myself to her for the 
voyage ; that is the second step. But now 
I pass from the passive state of being willing, 
to the active state of willing. I cross the 
gang-plank. I stand upon her decks. I re- 
main on her while she pushes outward into 
the stream. I am not only willing to trust 



Scriptural Faith, 125 

her — I will to trust her. That is the third, 
the crowning step — the voluntary step. 

And now toward God, this is the faith by 
which the just live. Faith begins in intellec- 
tual assent to the fact that God is, and that 
He has made provision for us in Jesus Christ. 
Faith passes on into an emotional consent of 
the heart, and willingness to accept Him as 
my God, and to intrust myself to the provi- 
sion He has made for me in Jesus Christ. 

Faith is crowned by a voluntary, a per- 
sonal, an active willing to know Him as my 
God, and to take for my own the grace fur- 
nished me in Jesus. 

This then is faith, by which the just live. 
It is assent of the intellect; it is consent of 
the heart ; it is personal and voluntary choice 
of that to which my head assents, and my 
heart consents; this is Scriptural, saving 
faith. 



THE PREPARED LIFE. 

GREAT lesson which the parable of 
the Ten Virgins urges is the necessity 
of the prepared life. 

One thing is certain as are the courses of 
the stars, — you cannot live with permanent 
and noble results a life extemporaneous, which 
goes on in careless fashion, from hand to 
mouth, which has gathered into itself no 
strong resource with which to meet the crises, 
opportunities, responsibilities which the com- 
ing days are sure to bring. Butterfly men 
can never be successful men. 

A log-cabin of the humblest out in a West- 
ern wilderness ; skins flapping in the door- 
frame to keep out a little the winter cold ; 
bare rough logs for walls ; rude split logs for 
floor; rough stones daubed with coarse mor- 
tar, reaching up into a chimney of mud and 
sticks, for fireplace and hearth-stone. 



The Prepared Life. 127 

In that cabin a fragile woman, smitten with 
consumption, bent to the dust under the 
hardships of her pioneering life, in the scanty 
intervals of toil calling her boy to her knee 
and teaching him to read. She sinking into 
a speedy grave, and her boy motherless. But 
her boy had learned to read and the sacred 
thirst for knowledge had been started in him. 
In that poor cabin these three books at least, 
the Bible, ^Esop's Fables, Pilgrim's Progress, 
and besides a meagre Life of Washington and 
a Life of Henry Clay, which the mother had 
managed to purchase for her boy. These 
books the boy had read and read again and 
kept on reading, far into the night often, 
when the day's hard toil was done, the pine 
knots in the rude fireplace flinging flickering 
light upon the pages. The innermost marrow 
and meaning of the books passed into the 
mental structure of the boy, came out on his 
lips in quaint, earnest, truthful, limpid speech. 
The boy's hunger for knowledge kept un- 
sated. As the years went he heard there was 
a science called grammar. It came to the 



128 The Brook in the Way. 

young man's ears that somebody possessed a 
grammar between seven and eight miles away. 
The distance was walked. The book was bor- 
rowed. The grammar was mastered. Mean- 
time writing had been somehow learned, and 
then the compressed sense of the few other 
books which by any means the young man 
could get chance at was written out clearly 
and thoughtfully. Then mounting with diffi- 
culty into higher branches, he studied math- 
ematics and became surveyor. Then the 
vision of the law as a path for life rose up 
before him. He studied while he had bread ; 
started out on a surveying tour that he might 
earn more ; came back to live upon the bread 
he earned, and study; made of an old tree on 
a hill near by the poor town in which he 
lived a place to study in in the summer 
weather; moved round the tree as the sun 
moved, that he might have shade ; was so 
much absorbed the people thought him crazy. 
Meanwhile the young man had sought in 
every way, by the poor debating clubs at 
hand, by political speeches on the stump, by 



The Prepared Life, 129 

the earnest perusal of such newspapers as, be- 
fore the days of railroads, came straggling 
into the frontier town, to perfect himself in 
the art of speech and to widen the range of 
his intelligence. 

When you think of it carefully you find 
such apparently meagre training not the 
worst sort perhaps. For what choicer foun- 
tains, after all, of concise, clear, telling, pa- 
thetic, enticing speech than our English Bible 
and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress? 

A rude and multifarious log frontier store. 
This young man, in the interval of other 
work, the clerk. A woman buying a little 
bill of goods, amounting by the reckoning to 
two dollars and six and a quarter cents. The 
woman going off. The clerk, adding the 
items of the bill again that he might make 
sure they were correct, discovers that he has 
taken six and a quarter cents too much. It 
is night ; the clerk shuts the store ; walks 
three miles and back to give the defrauded 
customer her exact due. The same store ; 
the same clerk ; just at night, at another time, 

9 



130 The Brook in the Way. 

another woman enters, asking for half a 
pound of tea. Tea weighed out; paid for; 
store left for the night. But when the clerk 
enters the store in the morning he sees by 
the daylight what he did not see by the dim 
candle-light, that there is only a four-ounce 
weight upon the scales. Immediately the 
young clerk takes a walk of miles before 
breakfast that he may deliver the remainder 
of the tea. Humble incidents these. Yes ; 
but mightily real. 

This same young man, now at last a law- 
yer; always seeking to stand upon the right 
side and the side of the oppressed; never 
lending himself to making the worse appear 
the better reason ; often deserting a case in 
mid-trial when he discovers that, through the 
trick of a client, he is on the wrong side rather 
than the right. 

A sincerely religious man, — not indeed in 
cant fashion, but profoundly persuaded that 
God is, that God is to be recognized, prayed 
to, depended on, served, and that God will 
surely make the right triumph in the end. 



The Prepared Life. 131 

So you see — though we cannot trace it 
further, for space fails — a very strong, true, 
earnest, honest character getting itself nur- 
tured and compacted here, amid such appar- 
ently hostile environment; and, as well, a 
brain getting itself brightened and broadened 
and made sinewy and fitted for tackling the 
toughest questions, by a culture which, albeit 
not of the schools, is yet a culture which 
has had in it the making of a man. 

So that when Abraham Lincoln is con- 
fronted by the awful chaos and conflict of 
the Civil War, his is no untrained hand and 
unprepared which is set to grasp the helm 
of the ship of state. Just such a man was 
needed for that sad and tasking time as Mr. 
Lincoln, all unconscious of his great destiny, 
had fitted himself to become, — a man of 
wide practical knowledge ; of the deftest and 
kindest skill ; of speech so clear and at the 
same time so quaint and homely that when 
he spoke the nation had to listen; of a 
willowy strength of body and of mind the 
heaviest burdens could not break; of an 



132 The Brook in the Way. 

honesty so unquestioned that even enemies 
must trust him ; of a patience like the charity 
which Paul commends, enduring all things, 
hoping «11 things, never failing ; of a faith 
which carried serene front in the blackest 
storms. The man and the time met, but they 
met because the man had become fitted for 
the time. A hap-hazard, wind-driven, care- 
less, lounging sort of life could never have 
given issue to a manhood great enough for 
the tremendous duty of those red and awful 
days. 

And I am sure you assent to what I say. 
I am sure you answer me, " Yes, the prin- 
ciple that there must be somehow personal 
fitness for the meeting of crises and the 
accomplishment of duty, illustrated so signally 
in the history of Abraham Lincoln, is a prin- 
ciple which must endure longer even than the 
most ancient heavens shall continue strong. 

Now, it is precisely this principle of pre- 
pared and personal fitness for crises and for 
duty that the parable of the Ten Virgins 
insists on in the realm of religion. No more 



The Prepared Life. 133 

in religion can one get on in slouching and 
hap-hazard ways. The lamps must have the 
oil prepared for them if they are to burn 
brightly instead of pitiably sputtering out. 
And men are wise or foolish as they, in view 
of the duties and crises of life and the awful 
certainties of death and judgment, have pre- 
pared or have neglected to prepare the oil. 



CHRIST OUR PROPHET. 

TN the old days Moses prophesied of Christ 
■*■ as Prophet. You will find the prophecy 
in the eighteenth chapter of Deuteronomy 
and at the fifteenth verse. In the new days 
we find Peter taking up this venerable pre- 
diction and declaring it fulfilled in Christ. 
Peter is preaching to the multitude thronging 
the Beautiful gate of the Temple, and just 
now hushed into awe by the healing of the 
man lame from his mother's womb : " And 
God shall send Jesus Christ, which before 
was preached unto you," says Peter; "for 
Moses truly said unto the fathers, a Prophet 
shall the Lord your God raise up unto you 
of your brethren like unto me; Him shall ye 
hear in all things whatsoever He shall say 
unto you." So this predicted prophet is 
Jesus Christ. 



Christ our Prophet. 135 

Now this prophet side of our Lord's work 
toward us is most important. We very much 
miss the meaning of this grand prophet office 
by confining it to a single function. With 
us, too much, a prophet means merely one 
who foretells future events. That was an 
element in the prophetic function, but it was 
not the only element, it was even a subordi- 
nate one. More than the mere predicter of 
events to come, the prophet was the authori- 
tative declarer of the truth of God, for the 
present as well as for the future. Here was 
his prime office. The prophet was a reveal- 
ing, and an authoritative Teacher. And this 
He is sinless, authoritative, infallible, highest, 
is Christ's chief province as our prophet- 
crowned Teacher of the truth of God to men. 

Now as prophet in this great sense of 
teacher Christ meets an utmost human need. 
How much I have thought of it since another 
directed my attention to it. See that statue 
of the dying gladiator, holding your eye there 
in the museum of the capitol at Rome ; that 
is not only a most wonderful piece of sculp- 



136 The Brook in the Way. 

ture, but it is a mighty symbol. A dying 
gladiator, — and so a picture of the wronged 
and suffering and unillumined heathen world, 
of the men who, for their holiday, could have 
no loftier or more thrilling pleasure than the 
causeless butchering of their fellows. See 
how, as his side is pierced and his life-blood 
drained away, his head is bowed helpless to 
the earth. To the earth, and to that only. 
He knows of nothing higher; he can con- 
ceive of nothing worthier. To the earth his 
head droops ; he looks toward no nobler, 
lordlier life to come. To the earth, — his life 
beginning there must end there. To the 
earth, — and as he sinks downward and still 
downward, this is the story he tells you, as 
one has put it, " Only the earth to look to in 
dull despair; only the earth on which to fall; 
only the earth into which to be trampled." 

And as I range in memory through those 
halls of ancient sculpture, through those re- 
mains of that wonderful, strong, yet untaught 
of God and unillumined and sad heathen life, 
I am struck by this peculiarity, that none of 



Christ our Prophet. 137 

those statues are upward-looking. As I re- 
member them they are almost all, if not all, 
downward-looking or simply forward-looking. 
They tell of nothing better than the earth. 
They speak, gazing upward to it, of no arch- 
ing and opening heaven. There is never a 
look as of a higher revelation falling on their 
faces. They seem to know simply of this 
life — nothing beyond it. For them the 
Prophet Christ had not appeared. Of His 
shining and authoritative revelation they were 
untaught. 

But when you pass from the heathen style 
of sculpture into the Christian, at once you 
recognize an immense difference. Now the 
main look is not earthward, it is upward. 
Think of the rude sculptures of the cata- 
combs ; think of the statues of the saints and 
martyrs thronging the old churches, — theirs 
is the upward look. From earth toward 
heaven their heads are lifted. They have 
seen the Prophet Christ. He has disclosed 
heaven to them. He has taught them that 
there is more for them than this poor earth. 



138 The Brook in the Way. 

He has told them of the soul and of the 
Father-God, and of the eternal brightness. 
This utmost human need the Prophet Christ 
has met; that which men could not of them- 
selves discover, He has authoritatively de- 
clared, — that this life may be but as the 
meagre vestibule of an infinitely grander life 
to come; that now there may be for men, 
amid the trials and distresses of this present 
life, the ascent of prevailing prayer and the 
descent of a divine and enabling strength. 
The Prophet Christ has rendered possible for 
man the upward look. 

In all my life I have met no drearier book 
than Mr. Cross's life of George Eliot. How 
steadily she keeps her gaze earthward. From 
the time when she turned her back upon 
Christianity I can remember no upward look 
in all its pages. Indeed, how could there be? 
For her God was an impossibility; immor- 
tality a poor dream ; the only thing left was 
this swift, failing life, rounded by a sleep. Oh, 
how dreary and unprofitable this earth must 
be if it be the kind of earth George Eliot 



Christ our Prophet. 139 

declared it to be. But it is not. How 
strange it was she would not see the Prophet 
Christ. I look at him, and with revealing 
finger he points from the little earth to the 
great heaven. So there can be given me a 
look onward, upward. Let me rejoice in the 
revelation of the Prophet Christ. Let me be 
thankful for the possibility he has brought me 
of the upward look. 



HOW THE LORD HELPS. 

A BOUT seven miles north by east of Jeru- 
•*■*" salem, there widens a steep and rocky 
valley running from east to west. Into it, 
from the northern side, there shoots a jagged 
angle. This advanced height the Philistines 
had seized and garrisoned as an outpost. Its 
name was Michmash. 

About a mile away from this Philistine out- 
post, and on the southern and opposite side 
of the deep valley, stood Geba, — a post held 
now by the Israelites under the command of 
Saul and Jonathan. 

We may be sure that each force scrutinized 
the other with close attention, separated as 
they were but by the distance of a mile, and 
with the valley lying low between them. 

The Israelites were in sorry plight. The 
Philistines, in their overrunning of the coun- 
try, had to a degree disarmed the people ; 



How the Lord Helps. 141 

taken special care to carry the smiths captive, 
that new arms might not be manufactured, 
and that such dull spears and arrows as were 
left might not be sharpened. Many of the 
Israelites, in despair, had turned clean trai- 
tors, and gone over to the Philistines. Saul's 
army had crumbled to a poor six hundred, 
and the hearts of these were wavering. 

But one morning, as in the early light the 
Hebrew watchmen look across the valley to 
the tents on Michmash, they discover a most 
strange commotion. In the gray of the early 
morning nothing can be seen with accuracy ; 
but it grows clearer that some sort of a con- 
flict is going on. What tumult can it be? 
Had the Philistines fallen out among them- 
selves? Had any from their own company, 
all unadvised, undertaken some desperate 
adventure ? 

Immediate muster is made, and it is found 
that Jonathan and his armor-bearer are ab- 
sent. So it gets certain that Jonathan has, 
somehow, some hand in that strange Philis- 
tine turmoil. 



142 The Brook in the Way. 

Well, the way of it was this: Jonathan 
cannot stand this dilly-dally longer. Some- 
thing must be done. Doing anything is bet- 
ter than doing nothing. Jonathan will say 
nothing to his father, Saul, about it, for in such 
desperate strait it must be desperate venture. 

And Jonathan said to the young man that 
bore his armor : " Come, and let us go over 
unto the garrison of these uncircumcised; it 
may be that the Lord will work for us ; for 
there is no restraint to the Lord to save by 
many or by few." 

There is a noble contagion in a real faith. 
The heart of the armor-bearer grows strong 
and consecrated, too. He makes swift an- 
swer, " Do all that is in thine heart ; turn 
thee ; behold, I am with thee according to 
thine heart." 

So the two men lay their plan together. 
They will move wisely and warily even in a 
faith venture. A true faith never discounts 
the utmost skill and wisdom the circum- 
stances admit. It is only an egotistical and 
blear-eyed fanaticism which does that. 



How the Lord Helps. 143 

They commit the whole matter to the 
Lord. 

There — in front of that Michmash prom- 
ontory — is another spur of rock outjutting, 
called Bozez. They will attempt their climb 
at that place, for the projection of this rock 
will conceal them till a good portion of their 
clambering has been finished. 

Besides, they will test somewhat the mood 
of these Philistines. It is no part of a genu- 
ine faith to fling itself into a sheer useless- 
ness. If, when they discover themselves to 
the Philistines, the Philistine sentinels should 
say, " Halt ! wait till we come to you," and 
should go forth toward them, it would show 
that the Philistines were ready for assault, 
were in the mood for courage, and that at- 
tack could not turn out well. If, on the 
other hand, the Philistine sentinels should 
shout, " Come up to us ! " it would show 
that the Philistines were in somewhat craven 
spirits, were lurking behind entrenchments, 
were not ready for open fight. And this 
might be taken as a fair sign that God was 



144 Th e Brook in the Way, 

with these daring Hebrews, and that a sud- 
den and bold stroke might smite sudden 
terror into craven hearts. 

So, amid the mists of the earliest morn- 
ing, the two men begin their sublime faith 
venture. 

Under the concealing shadow of Bozez, 
and with great difficulty, for the way is 
mightily rough, the two men climb on and 
up. At length they are discovered by the 
Philistine sentinels. " Behold, the Hebrews 
come forth out of the holes where they had 
hid themselves," they say to each other. 
But in a kind of want of courage which keeps 
them behind their battlements, they shout, 
derisively, to the two men, " Come up to us 
and we will show you a thing ! " 

At such propitious omen of a kind of fear 
on the part of the Philistines, the heart of 
Jonathan waxes doubly strong. " Come up 
after me," he whispers to his armor-bearer, 
" for the Lord hath delivered them into the 
hand of Israel." 

Swiftly, on hands and knees, the two men 



How the Lord Helps. 145 

climb on. They reach the summit. They 
do not hesitate. With stalwart blows, on 
every side, they lay about them. Before the 
Philistines can recover from their surprise 
twenty of them have fallen. Onward march 
the heroes. It is in the gray and misty morn- 
ing. The sentinels have been stricken down. 
How many of the Hebrews have forced their 
way into this Michmash, deemed inaccessible 
and invincible, the Philistines cannot know. 
A panic seizes them. In the gray light and 
in the great confusion the Philistines cannot 
distinguish friend from foe. They fall upon 
each other. They become their own de- 
stroyers. Riot and ruin capture them. Just 
then an earthquake shudders. Their hearts 
quake. They are fleeing like sheep. 

It is this commotion which Saul sees, lean- 
ing his gigantic stature against his tall, strong 
spear, beneath the pomegranate tree which 
is in Migron, upon the heights of Geba; it 
is this he sees, getting what glimpses he can 
of it, in the dim, morning light, and between 
the swaying wreaths of morning mists. 

10 



146 The Brook in the Way. 

No moment may be lost. Saul summons 
his followers. They dash across the valley. 
They scale the other side. Now that the tide 
has turned, craven hearts become courageous. 
From the caves and holes whither the sol- 
diers of Saul's decaying army have been 
slinking, they come forth. Those who had 
deserted to the Philistines remember their 
loyalty and lay about them at the retreating 
hosts. Saul's army is swelling every moment. 
He plunges into the melee. The Philistines 
melt away as snow-drifts before spring suns. 

So the Lord saved Israel that day; and the 
battle passed over unto Beth-aven. 

So. How? There is wonderful suggestion 
here of the way of the Divine help. 

Mediately, not immediately; not through 
sheer downfall of the Divine power, scatter- 
ing the Philistines, but through Jonathan, 
putting forth his consecrated energy in at- 
tacking the Philistines. When will men learn 
that this is always the way of the Divine help, 
always instrumentally, never in the way of a 
simply supernatural fashion. Regeneration 



How the Lord Helps. 147 

through the truth. Prayer answered through 
obedient attempt. Men won to Jesus through 
personal contact with them. What is the rea- 
son that a church of, say, five hundred mem- 
bers can go on year after year and report but 
here and there a sporadic conversion? The 
reason is plain, — the membership does not 
go for the unconverted ; it listens to its ser- 
mons, sings its songs, prays its prayers, gives 
its gifts ; but the exception is that a member 
of that church really attacks another man for 
Jesus. 

Through faith God helps. "Let us go to 
these uncircumcised" said Jonathan. He 
knew that God's promises for the possession 
of Canaan were for him, the Israelite, and 
not for them. Jonathan dared risk on the 
promises. Romaine's new year's wish for 
his people was, " God grant this may be a 
year famous for believing." Oh, if this might 
be such a year for Christians, what a year of 
prevailing against the Philistines it would be ! 

" And so you really expect to make im- 
pression upon the Chinese empire?" asked 



148 The Brook in the Way. 

the sceptical merchant of the missionary Mor- 
rison, who had taken passage to China on his 
ship. " No, sir; but I expect God will," was 
the calm, confident reply. 

Through the hard work of Jonathan, God 
saved Israel. It was rough climbing for him ; 
he had to clamber on hands and knees ; but 
because it was hard he did not refuse. 

Through the help his armor-bearer rendered 
Jonathan, God saved Israel. That is what 
a Society of Christian Endeavor may be to a 
pastor, his armor-bearer. How mightily does 
a pastor's heart leap when he hears such a 
Jonathan saying to him, " Turn thee ; behold, 
I am with thee according to thy heart." 

Through the contagion of high example 
God saved Israel. The bold stroke of Jon- 
athan and his armor-bearer was powerful not 
only against the Philistines, but, as well, in 
their own army. It put courage into the 
fearful. It reached deserters. It turned the 
day. 

If you and some one with you are the only 
ones in all your church who will attempt 



How the Lord Helps. 149 

aggressive work, — personal speech to men, 
visitation from house to house, tract distribu- 
tion, the invitation to the sanctuary, — go 
forth ; in God's name, go forth. Your ex- 
ample shall win and hearten others. 
So the Lord saved Israel that day. 



A LIFE LESSON. 

WHAT a fair young life looks out upon 
us from the window of this ancient 
Scripture : " Joseph being seventeen years 
old was feeding the flock with his brethren." 
This is the first mention of him, save only the 
record of his birth some chapters back. But 
the life, whose story is thus introduced, fills 
nearly all the spaces of the remaining chap- 
ters of Genesis. In the old picture-gallery 
of this earlier Scripture, there is no portrait 
which stands less dimmed by time, and more 
inspiring with noble teaching than this of 
Joseph. It is a fair, young life which we see 
now. Into how strange a future does it gaze 
with its earnest, hopeful eyes. 

Not such a future, I am sure, as it imag- 
ined, thinking of what the years might bring 
it, there amid the flocks of Jacob. It thought 



A Life Lesson. 151 

great things for itself, — about mastery over 
brethren, and a sun-like destiny, as youth 
always does. Why should not youth? For 
it, the world is wide, and time is vast, and 
hope sees rainbows where more chastened 
eyes can behold only the dark clouds, with no 
color painted on their flanks. But such life 
as he really met and mastered, I am sure not 
Joseph even dreamed. 

As I think of it there comes to me the 
memory of a scene I saw once in the far West. 
From the summit of Mount Washburne, in 
the Yellowstone National Park, I first beheld 
it, — that smooth, celestial bit of water, the 
Yellowstone Lake. It lay there in the clasp 
of the green hills, mirroring all the heavens 
in its quiet bosom. How peacefully forth 
from its portals flowed the Yellowstone River ! 
How it wound its silver gleam for a little 
through the level prairie ! " I wonder if those 
waters know to what they are coming," I re- 
member I asked myself; for there, within my 
sight, was the awful gorge of the Yellowstone, 
into whose depths, in such a little time, the 



152 The Brook in the Way. 

river fell, with all its peace shattered by the 
plunge into foam and roar and trouble. And 
from that leap, the river knows no smoothness 
for many a mile. It is caught in rapids. It 
is fretted by cataracts. It is hindered by 
vast stones, which the frosts have wrenched 
from mountain sides and flung into its chan- 
nel. But it gets to the peaceful sea at last, 
I thought. Yes, it gets there ; but along how 
rough a way ! And yet, mastering the rough- 
ness, and doing the best it can among the 
stones, it gets there. God makes a way for 
it. And God will make a way for us surely. 
" I will be like the river," I said. " I will do 
the best I may amid whatever roughness 
Providence may bring. I will trust God's 
leading." 

" Beyond the frost-chain and the fever 

I shall be soon. 
Beyond the rock-waste and the river, 
Beyond the ever and the never, 

I shall be soon. 
Love, rest and home, sweet home, 
Lord, tarry not, but come." 

That river taught me much. 



A Life Lesson, 153 

Like that river was the life of Joseph. It 
started, how peacefully ; it fell, how soon into 
plunges and rocks and rapids of trouble ! 
But better than the peace of the beginning 
was the peace of the ending. A grand and 
noble life was behind that ending; a life 
which overcame instead of being overcome. 

Like Joseph's life, in the most real of 
senses, must yours and mine be too. It must 
find its falls and rocks. God grant it may 
find as grand an ending. It shall, if we but 
meet the rocks as manfully and as religiously 
as Joseph did. 



THE WORLD'S SPRING. 

THERE is something inexpressibly de- 
lightful to me in the days of the early 
spring. The tenderer blue in the arching 
heavens ; the softer, more transparent folds 
in the white tents of the clouds ; the steady 
thickening of the tracery of the twigs against 
the sky as the buds bulge on them ; the pur- 
ple flower of the maple and the dangling 
tassels of the poplar and the hazel; the 
picket-guards of the great army of the birds 
sent on ahead, — the exquisite note, so softly 
sweet, of the song sparrow, the flash of the 
blue-bird's wing, the bright uniform of the 
meadow-lark, as he struts among the greening 
grass with his breast of gold and collar of 
black and wings with their white margins ; 
and here and there a leaf of the hardier sort, 
pushing its verdure bravely out into the air 



The World's Spring. 155 

not quite cleaned of its winter chill, yet with 
its edge rounded by a touch of warmth. 

* Yes, there is a deep great gladness in the 
early spring-time. Winter with its ice and 
with its death is all behind, and busily the 
spring is rearing appropriate vestibule for 
the glorious summer. 

It made no difference — it could not hinder 
the real gladness of the time — even though, 
as when I was walking in an early spring, a 
heavy, spiteful cloud flung snow-flakes at me. 
They were but last and retreating efforts. 
The power of such clouds was broken. The 
spring with its deep gladness was really 
around me. 

Thus it was with the disciples. For them 
a great, glad, spiritual spring had burst. They 
had been caught in a winter most terrible and 
desolate. They had been bitten to their 
deepest hearts with iciest chill. All the 
leaves of their fair hopes had fallen ; and on 
their whole spiritual landscape the thickest 
drifts of the snows of hopelessness had piled 
themselves. They had trusted that their 



156 The Brook in the Way. 

Master had been He who should have re- 
deemed Israel. They had followed Him for 
three years in constantly growing expecta- 
tion. They had heard Him speak as man 
never spake. They had seen Him do as man 
never did, — cast demons out; put sceptre 
into the hand of health and dispossess disease 
from many a sickness-tortured body; even 
send authoritative voice far down into the rot- 
ting prison-house of death, and command the 
prisoner back into life, and with not so much 
as the touch of the fire of death on any of his 
garments. Surely, death could never capture 
Him. Surely, Pharisee and Sadducee might 
plot, and Sanhedrim might sentence, and the 
Roman Pilate might sanction the execution 
of the sentence, but certainly death could not 
touch Him, the Master. In the last extrem- 
ity He would, by a simple word, make Death 
crouch helpless at His feet. Surely it was 
He — the promised One, the One for whom 
the weary centuries had been waiting — who 
should restore the kingdom to Israel. 

But on that Friday afternoon they had seen 



The World's Spring. 157 

death grimly capture even Him. Men had 
crucified Him. They had gashed his side. 
They had spilled His heart out. If any one 
had ever died, in humanity's long experience 
of death, He had died utterly. Tenderly the 
disciples had taken the dead body from that 
cross. Lovingly they had buried it in that 
new tomb. Against the tomb's mouth the 
great stone had been rolled and sealed. It 
was all over. He was dead and buried, and 
a mighty winter had wrapped them round. 

But oh, wonder of wonders ! Oh, the 
quick melting of the snows ! Oh, the swift 
bursting of the leaves, and the time of the 
singing of the birds ! 

" At evening, being the first day of the 
week, when the doors were shut where the 
disciples were assembled, for fear of the Jews, 
came Jesus and stood in the midst of them, 
and saith unto them, ' Peace be with you.' 
And when He had so said He showed unto 
them His hands and His side. Then were 
the disciples glad when they saw the Lord!' 
What matter if still snows of persecution 



158 The Brook in the Way. 

might be flung at them from baffled, hating 
Pharisee and Sadducee. Let them fling at 
them such snows. Still their power was 
broken. The disciples' spring had come. 
Their joy no man could take from them. 
Then were the disciples glad when they saw 
the Lord. 

So, also, albeit the world knew it not, the 
worlds spring had broken. It had been a 
dreary winter into which the world had fallen. 
For centuries the world had been trying to 
get on of itself, apart from God. In many 
ways the world had been trying to help itself. 
It had tried culture, as at Athens, but that had 
failed. Art had shone as art has since shone 
never. Cultivated reason had, to the utmost, 
tasked itself. Socrates had guessed, and Plato 
had thought. But Stoic said, There is only an 
infinite fate ; and Epicurean said, There is only 
an infinite carelessness ; and Sophist said, The 
best thing you can do is to play skilfully with 
words. And men were weary with their sin, 
and dumb in the presence of the great ques- 
tions of life, and sin, and death, and of the 



The World's Spring, 159 

other life, which they could not help asking, 
but for which they could win no answer. 

The world had tried government, as at 
Rome. But steadily, as the years went, lib- 
erty had become more and more the thrall of 
tyranny, until now in the single mailed hand 
of the Roman Emperor the fortunes of the 
world were grasped, and all men hung help- 
less upon his single nod. 

The world had tried war ; and war had 
only avenged with its awful desolation. The 
world had tried luxury ; but — 

" On that hard Pagan world disgust 

And sated loathing fell ; 
Deep weariness and sated lust 

Made human life a hell. 
In his cool hall with haggard eyes 

The Roman noble lay ; 
He drove abroad in furious guise 

Along the Appian way; 
He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, 

And crowned his head with flowers ; 
No easier, nor no quicker passed 
The impracticable hours." 

This was what men said : " It is better to 
stand than to walk, better to sit than to stand, 



160 The Brook in the Way. 

better to lie down than to sit, better to sleep 
than to wake ; better is a dreamless sleep than 
dreams ; death is better than even a dream- 
less sleep ; and never to have been is best of 
all." This was what men said : — 



" For we are all, like swimmers in the sea, 
Poised on the top of a huge wave of fate, 
Which hangs uncertain to which side to fall. 
And whether it will heave us up to land, 
Or whether it will roll us out to sea, — 
Back out to sea, to the deep waves of death, — 
We know not, and no search will make us know; 
Only the event will teach us in its hour." 



This was what men said, as did the Emperor 
Tiberius, whom Pliny calls " tristissimus, ut 
constat, hominum " (confessedly the most 
gloomy of mankind), — as did the Emperor 
Tiberius to the Roman Senate, from that 
island of Capreae, shining like an emerald 
upon the sapphire waters of the Bay of 
Naples, with the whole world under tribute 
to bring him pleasure : " What to write to 
you, Conscript Fathers, or how to write or 
what to write, — may all the Gods and God- 



The World's Spring, 161 

desses destroy me worse than I feel that they 
are daily destroying me if I know." 

It was a dreary winter into which the 
world had fallen. But though the world 
knew it not as yet, its spring had really come 
— now that Jesus was risen from the dead. 
For He was God's answer to the world's deep- 
est questions. His atoning blood was the 
fountain open for the cleansing of the world's 
sin. His gospel was the cure for the world's 
evils. His life, in the Resurrection seen to 
be mightier than the world's death, was the 
invulnerable proof that man might rise from 
this poor earth to heaven. 

Ah, for deeper reasons than it was then 
possible for them then to know, might the 
disciples and all the world be glad as they 
saw the risen Lord. Their spring had come. 



ii 



A TEST OF BEING CHRISTIAN. 

I HAVE been impressed lately with the 
apostolic insistence upon the fact of 
change as a test of the possession of the 
Christian life. 

For example, Paul tells the Thessalonians 
that they were " ensamples," because they 
had " turned to God from idols, to serve the 
living and true God." 

Immediately this test of change came out 
in them. 

When Dr. Judson was held in such cruel 
captivity at Rangoon, and when his heroic 
wife was contriving to save his life by smug- 
gling food and drink to him in his prison, 
and Dr. Judson was held there prisoner 
until the English army took the city and 
set the prisoners free, then Havelock was 



A Test of being Christian, 163 

lieutenant in that army, and was a praying 
lieutenant, as he was afterwards a praying 
general. 

No sooner was the city captured than 
Havelock sought out a fit place for a prayer- 
meeting. There was a famous temple in a 
retired grove dedicated to Buddh. Havelock 
secured, as a place of prayer, one of the 
chambers in this temple, a large room filled 
with the images of heathen gods, sitting on 
every side with their legs crossed and arms 
folded in their laps. 

One day another officer, strolling round 
the temple, thought he heard the sound of 
English singing. He stopped and listened. 
Strange sound from such a place ; but that 
certainly was a good old English hymn, float- 
ing off in a good old English tune. The offi- 
cer determined to follow the sound; and it 
led him to this upper chamber, where Have- 
lock, with his Bible and hymn-book before 
him, surrounded by more than a hundred of 
his soldiers, was holding a prayer-meeting. 

The room was very dark ; but every idol 



164 The Brook in the Way, 

had a lamp in his lap, shedding more light 
than idol had ever done before. 

The heathen temple had been turned to 
the true service of the true God. 

Symbol, that, of the change which a real 
religion must produce in human hearts. 
Though there may be among us no heathen 
temples, there are yet heathen hearts. I 
confess I am often staggered in the presence 
of the mystery, the appalling fact, of the 
birth into evil; of this centring, as by an 
irresistible moral destiny, of each heart about 
something else than God. And yet no fact 
of life is a more real fact. And just that is 
idolatry. If the soul seek and gather round 
anything else than God supremely, that soul 
is idolatrous. It makes little matter what 
that something else may be, — whether ambi- 
tion, which cares only for the glory shining 
round the self, nothing for God's glory; 
whether wealth, for the sake of which one 
prostrates and prostitutes noblest faculties, 
designed for a higher worship and a higher 
service; whether fashion, which, fascinated 



A Test of being Christian. 165 

by the tinsel of an outward adornment, pays 
no care to the inward dress and grace of soul 
which God demands ; whether evil habit ; 
whether this or that which tends to keep out 
of the soul's sight and loyalty the living and 
the loving God, — that is an idol. And the 
soul which clings to it and bends before it 
is a soul idolatrous. 

And the sad, grim fact about our human 
life is that naturally, as it is born, and as it 
runs, something else does always stand in the 
rightful place of God. Every human heart 
is, naturally, a temple dedicated to some 
Buddh or other, rather than to the living 
God. 

Now, a real religion comes to set at rights 
these carnal hearts of ours ; to give God His 
throne in them. Like that chamber in that 
heathen temple where Havelock gathered his 
men to pray, each heart must be changed 
from the old, and consecrated to a new and 
nobler worship. And like those heathen 
idols, each one holding a lamp to help God's 
worship on, in every heart that which has 



1 66 The Brook in the Way. 

been supreme must become subservient; its 
very idols must be compelled into the service 
of the true and living God. 

Change, then, is a constant and irreversible 
test of being a Christian. And any sort of 
religion which comes speaking smooth things 
about the usual carnal heart and life, coun- 
selling that all that is needed is richer and 
broader culture, is no religion ; is but the 
sham and seeming of it; is only as a sur- 
geon's knife delicately grazing the scab 
of the cancer instead of probing it to the 
bottom. 

Nothing can be right in any heart till that 
heart puts God in His rightful place. That 
only is a true gospel which, first of all, with- 
out equivocation, peremptorily demands 
change, a radical turning from whatever op- 
poses and dishonors God, to God. 



THINK IT NOT STRANGE. 

IT is noteworthy how largely martial are the 
Scripture figures setting forth the Chris- 
tian life. All the possible imagery which 
war furnishes is laid hold of. The Christian 
is a warrior. The Christian must be har- 
nessed like a warrior, with the breast-plate 
of righteousness, shield of faith, helmet of 
salvation. The Christian must have weap- 
ons ; he must grasp the sword of the Spirit. 
The Christian must play the warrior's part, — 
struggle, endure, overcome. Triumph is to 
spring out of fight, and put its heel upon the 
head of enemies that bite the dust. 

Now, we are not to think of this necessity 
of struggle as though some strange thing 
happened unto us. The Christian life but 
falls under the dominion of a universal law. 
Everything that gets up must struggle up. 



1 68 The Brook in the Way. 

We may find hints and symbols of this great 
law everywhere. We are surrounded by the 
wrestling of rival forces. What is noble can 
live only by the vanquishment of the less 
noble. Here is our body, for example. It 
is pulled earthward by gravitation. If this 
force of gravitation were unresisted, as is 
the case when the body dies, we should be 
dragged to the ground. But the nobler mus- 
cular power of life struggles against the 
attraction of the matter of the globe and over- 
comes it. Thus we are enabled to stand 
upright, walk, run, bear burdens. 

Here again is a dead body, — what happens 
now, since death has smitten it? Chemical 
forces seize at once upon it, break up its 
tissues, separate the gases of which it is com- 
posed. But during life the nobler, vital 
powers establish the supremacy of a higher 
chemistry. These very forces which destroy 
the body, dead, by this higher vital energy 
are turned from attack upon the substance of 
the body and are set at work upon the nutri- 
ment which it receives, elaborating and build- 



Think it not Strange. 169 

ing that up into the living structure. The 
higher, vital powers triumph. Physical life 
can be, only as it contends with and vanishes 
death. 

Exactly so the spiritual life can only be, as 
it is in contest with, and gains victory over, 
the lower life, — the earthly, the sensual. 
The Christian life is but another subject of a 
vast law. It wrests its radiant crown out of 
the grip of struggle. 



THE ANCHOR OF THE SOUL. 

WALKING, on a day one summer, 
through the vast navy-yard of Ports- 
mouth, England, I came upon a street called 
Anchor Street. There, side by side, in long 
lines, were laid multitudes of the hugest 
anchors. You could not look at those im- 
mense and grappling flukes, and mighty iron 
shafts, without a very real feeling of a restful 
mastery over tides and storms. With her 
cable fastened to one of those great anchors, 
and with that anchor getting grip on the 
bottom of the sea, no lee shore could threaten, 
or devastating breaker harm the gallant ship. 
Do you remember how in the Epistle to 
the Hebrews we are told of the anchor of 
the soul? The anchor of the soul — what 
steady, masterful word this, amid the tossings 
and the changes and the dashing uncertainties 
of our lives ! 



The Anchor of the Soul, 171 

And will you notice a peculiarity of this 
anchor of the soul ? We are told it enter eth 
into that within the veil. The veil in the old 
Temple was the symbol of separation between 
God and man. And in this Scripture about 
the anchor of the soul, the veil stands for 
whatever distance, or mystery, or sinfulness 
may divide and hinder us from God and hide 
Him from us. 

The great navigator Sir Francis Drake 
made a voyage round the world in the ship 
" Golden Hind," — a little vessel of but a 
hundred and twenty tons. At last, after an 
absence of two years and ten months, he 
dropped his anchor in Deptford harbor. The 
great Queen Elizabeth refused to summon 
him to her palace to make him knight; but 
went herself to Deptford, and, standing with 
her royal feet on the deck of his little but 
triumphant vessel, laid the sword upon his 
shoulders, and bade him stand before her 
henceforth Sir Francis Drake. The great 
Queen knew how, right royally, to reward 
those who added glory to her crown. And 



172 The Brook in the Way. 

she gave him a crest he might wear proudly 
ever after, — a ship in full sail with a cable 
running up to Heaven, an emblem of the 
Divine guidance which had helped him to do 
the, till then, unheard-of deed. 

Sir Francis' crest is a kind of picture of the 
Scripture word about this anchor of the soul. 
For this anchor of the soul is not flung into 
any sea-bottom ; does not go down into any 
shifting worldly place or thing. But tip- 
ward this anchor of the soul is cast. The 
hawser which holds this anchor passes up 
and through the celestial spaces, through 
every veil of any sort hiding the face of God, 
and there, in the place of the selectest Divine 
Presence, the flukes of this anchor of the 
soul seize and hold to the very buttresses of 
God's Throne ; and this anchor to God's 
Throne keeps moored even a poor human 
soul. 

Not like a ship driven of the storm, and 
flung into the black jaws of cruel reefs, 
where the breakers dash and tear, need any 
of us be. For we may have a hope which 



The Anchor of the Soul. 173 

is as an anchor of the sou/, both sure and 
steadfast, and which enter eth into that with- 
in the veil. 

Consider, it is a fact that we may have such 
an anchor of the soul, because for us has been 
spoken the Divine promise. This is the argu- 
ment of the inspired author of the great 
Epistle to the Hebrews. This is the key 
which he is striking all the time, — promise, 
promise. There are those who through faith 
and patience inherit the promises. To Abra- 
ham God made promise. Not less to you 
does God make promise. This anchor of the 
soul is forged of no less stanch iron than 
the Divine promise. I was talking once 
with Mr. Spurgeon about prayer. Said 
the great preacher and master of prevailing 
prayer : " A man must have a promise behind 
him in order to prevailing prayer; grip a 
promise, and a man can pray." Faith is not 
ecstasy, a rapt and shining mood, a vision 
on some mountain of transfiguration ; these 
things may be the results of faith, they are 
not faith itself. Faith is fastening to God's 



174 The Brook in the Way. 

promise. Take John Bunyan, in his days of 
spiritual storms and tossings : " I should in 
these days, often in my greatest agonies, 
even flounce toward the promise, as the 
horses do toward the sound ground, that yet 
stick in the mire ; concluding, though, as one 
almost bereft of his wits through fear, on this 
will I rest and stay, and leave the fulfilling 
of it to the God of Heaven that made it. Oh, 
many a pull hath my heart had with Satan 
for that blessed sixth of John, ' Him that 
cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.' I 
did not now, as at other times, look princi- 
pally for comfort, though, oh, how welcome 
would it have been with me ! but now a word, 
a word to lean my weary soul upon, that I 
might not sink forever ! It was that I hunted 
for." And the anchor of the promise held 
for buffeted John Bunyan. Oh, tossed one, 
weary one, here is something that will hold, 
— this anchor of the soul forged from the 
promises of God. 

Consider, also, it is a fact that we may 
have an anchor of the soul, because the Divine 



The Anchor of the Soul. 175 

promise has been ratified to us by the Divine 
oath. Turn to the argument of the author 
of the Epistle to the Hebrews here : " For 
when God made promise to Abraham, be- 
cause He could swear by no greater, He 
swore by Himself. For men verily swear by 
the greater, and an oath for confirmation is 
to them an end of all strife. Wherein God, 
willing more abundantly, to show unto the 
heirs of promise the immutability of His 
counsel, confirmed it with an oath." " By 
Myself have I sworn" said Jehovah to Abra- 
ham. As the Jewish legend tells it: " Said 
Moses reverently to God, ' Hadst Thou sworn 
by Heaven and earth, I should have said they 
will perish, and therefore so may Thy oath ; 
but as Thou hast sworn by Thy Great Name, 
that oath shall endure forever." ' Surely, 
anchor for the soul here, — every promise of 
God certified by the oath of God. Certainly, 
here is iron massive enough and tough 
enough out of which to form an anchor for 
the soul, — these " two immutable things," 
God's promise and God's oath. 



176 The Brook in the Way, 

But consider, further, that we may go even 
beyond this. Not only is it a fact that there 
may be for us an anchor of the soul because 
we have God's promise, and God's promise 
ratified ; there is another reason and a higher 
even. It is a fact that we may have an 
anchor of the soul because we have a Fore- 
runner — ''Whither, within the veil, the Fore- 
runner is for us entered, even Jesus." God 
does not give us promise only, He gives us 
specimen, too. Jesus is one with us. He 
was made in the likeness of sinful flesh. He 
came into our place and plight. He allied 
himself with us indissolubly. He took upon 
Himself our nature, never to cast it off. He 
is elder Brother; He died, He rose, He as- 
cended, He is majestic with the eternal victory 
and shining. He is beforehand specimen of 
what will come to us, since with Him we are 
joint-heirs. He is pledge of my triumph, if 
I trust Him, for He is my Forerunner. 

Weld this, then, also, into the anchor for 
your soul. Christ is forerunning specimen of 
what glory you may rise to. 



The Anchor of the Soul. lyj 

Well, is not here what the author of the 
epistle calls " strong consolation? " Let me 
be girded and glad with an undiminished 
courage. I have right to sing, as the old 
song has it, " My anchor holds within the 
veil." 



12 



TOGETHER. 

HPHAT is a most sweet pastoral of Ruth 
-■- and Naomi. You remember the tender 
story. 

Famine had blistered and bitten Canaan. 
So sore was it that Elimelech, and his wife 
Naomi, and their two sons, Mahlon and Chil- 
ion, must, in search of bread, flee from their 
home and go southward and eastward beyond 
the Jordan, into the land of Moab. 

It was not long, however, before Elimelech, 
Naomi's husband, died in a strange land, and 
she was desolate. After a time her two sons 
wedded two of the fair women of the land of 
Moab ; the name of the one was Orphah, and 
the name of the other Ruth. 

Time went on until ten years had sped 
away, and then another sorrow fell ; for now 
the sons of Naomi, Mahlon and Chilion, died 
also, and the three bereaved women were 



Together. 1 79 

desolate together. But to Naomi just now 
the tidings came that in Canaan the famine 
had yielded to plenty; that the Lord had 
visited His people in giving them bread. 
The heart of Naomi yearns for her old home ; 
now that it is possible, she will go back to 
Canaan. 

Turning her face homeward, her two 
daughters-in-law go a distance with her, a 
convoy of affection. But the place and time 
of parting have now come, and Naomi said 
unto her two daughters-in-law, " Go, return 
each to her mother's house ; the Lord deal 
kindly with you, as ye have dealt with the 
dead, and with me." Then she kissed them 
and they lifted up their voices and wept. I 
will not wait to rehearse all the loving collo- 
quy that went on just here between the 
weeping women. Naomi was going into 
scenes perfectly strange to her daughters-in- 
law, and they were but defenceless widows ; 
and to be a widow, in that Eastern order of 
society, was to be in most sad plight. Or- 
phan will leave Naomi and go back to her 



180 The Brook in the Way. 

friends in Moab. Do' not blame her over- 
much. I think most of us would have done 
the same. To go as a widow, with a widow, 
and as a stranger, and of another race, looked 
like going into a desert. 

But Ruth, to Naomi's loving expostulation, 
answers, " Entreat me not to leave thee, or 
to return from following after thee ; for 
whither thou goest, I will go ; and where 
thou lodgest, I will lodge ; thy people shall 
be my people, and thy God my God ; where 
thou diest will I die, and there will I be 
buried ; the Lord do so to me, and more 
also, if aught but death part me and thee." 

When Naomi saw that she was steadfastly 
minded to go with her, then she left off speak- 
ing unto her. A steadfast mind makes steady 
feet. So they two went until they came to 
Bethlehem. 

Afterwards great triumph and shining 
honor fell to Ruth. She became the wife of 
the wealthy and gifted Boaz ; was near an- 
cestress of David, the king after God's own 
heart; and, more than all, was one of the 



Together. 181 

honored ones along whose lines, in the ful- 
ness of the times, was born our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ. 

Of all women of Hebrew history, and of all 
the women in the world — save perhaps only 
Mary, who was the mother of our Lord — 
no woman stands in higher place, or is held 
in more fragrant memory, than this Ruth who 
would cleave to Naomi. 

And the thing to be noticed is that all this 
blessing and brightness came to Ruth pre- 
cisely because she did so cleave to Naomi ; 
precisely because she did so thoroughly iden- 
tify herself with this Hebrew matron to whom 
belonged the covenants ; precisely because 
she would join herself to Naomi in a union 
deep and irreversible. Which things, it has 
seemed to me, are a kind of parable and il- 
lustration. 

With that picture of Ruth, so joining her- 
self with Naomi, read some such Scripture as 
the following: " And hast raised us up to- 
gether, and made us sit together, in heavenly 
places, in Christ Jesus." 



1 82 The Brook in the Way. 

Together ; together in Christ Jesus. How 
the thought of share and union with, and, in 
a sense, identification of the believer with his 
Lord, weights the words in this brief passage ! 
How plainly the way of the true life shines ! 
Let us say to the Lord Jesus what Ruth could 
not to Naomi; let us put in place of " if 
aught but," " if even," — the Lord do so to 
me and more also, if even death part me and 
thee. Together with Christ is safety, help, 
the shining yonder. Apart from Christ but 
Moab ; together with Him all the surpassing 
things that Canaan means. 



PEACE. 

EXQUISITE promise that in Isaiah's proph- 
ecy: " Thou wilt keep him in perfect 
peace whose mind is stayed on Thee, because 
he trusteth in Thee." Think a moment of 
the meaning of such peace, and of the way 
into it. 

Peace is beyond a mere placidity. It is 
more than a somnolent and passive quiet. 
It is an unclashing and smooth harmony of 
parts and powers ; and so the strength and 
steady triumph which come out of such a 
harmony. So a real peace is something 
which achieves rather than simply enjoys. 
It is such peace which God gives. 

Because God is defence ; amid the dangers 
and difficulties of life, the soul looks upward 
and lives, not in what darkening things may 
immediately surround, but in the strong hand 
of God. 



1 84 The Brook in the Way. 

Because God is explanation ; to the tang- 
ling, perplexing questions about the world 
and life, God is the answer the soul can rest 
in. 

Because God is the true object of affection ; 
the heart must be restless until it rests in 
God, the infinite beauty, love, power. 

Because the service of God is the organ- 
izing duty for life ; peace comes where a man 
submits to highest duty, and the highest duty 
is self-surrendering service of the Highest. 

Because in the atonement of the Divine 
Son is peace of conscience only to be found. 

We enter into the peace by trusting. But 
the essential element of a real trust is con- 
sent of heart to the object of trust, is self- 
surrender. The reason why we do not have 
more of God's strong peace is because we 
do not entirely surrender to God as the 
rightful King of heart and life. 



THE DOOM OF GROWING. 

THE fisherman found in his net, which 
he drew to shore, a bottle. In the 
bottle an Afrite was imprisoned. From the 
prisoner came to the fisherman prayer for 
deliverance. And when the fisherman un- 
stopped the bottle the genius swelled at 
once into proportions vast and even fright- 
ful. He could no more into the bottle be 
gotten back. He stood there an awe-inspiring 
and immense development, overshadowing 
the trembling fisherman. 

I think the story from those Arabian Nights 
which enchanted our childhood holds real 
meaning. 

In some such way life comes to us. This 
great gift of life which God puts into our 
weak, idly swaying, baby hands is at first 
very small, hindered, germinal. But starting 



1 86 The Brook in the Way. 

there, in the infant, the awful life is disim- 
prisoned. There lies latent in it develop- 
ment eternal. The doom of growth is over 
it. Advance it must in some direction, for- 
ever and forever. It cannot stay in germ. 
As the years roll on into the ages it con- 
stantly becomes. And it constantly becomes 
somewhat. It may take form demoniac, hate- 
ful, ugly with sin, with the furrows of guilt 
ploughed into its features ; it may become 
pure, white, strong, beautiful, pushing higher 
and still higher into the light and service 
of God. 

We set off a sort of men, calling them self- 
made. They are men whose youth was 
straitened in hard environment. They are 
men who have wrested fortunes from the 
grip of hostile circumstance. They are men 
who have hewn their own way out of hin- 
drances into eminence, wealth, influence. 
They themselves have done it. You could 
not say of them, birth, education, favoring 
chance, helped. John Roach was such a 
man. As if a palm, leaf-burdened and fruit- 



The Doom of Growing. 187 

burdened, should lift itself out of the pure 
desert, in defiance of the sands and blistering 
sun. And there is no sight beneath the 
stars more morally impelling and worthier 
of honor than such sight of an advancing 
and overcoming manhood. 

Yet, in a deeper sense, all men are self- 
made. Your plant may be rooted in the 
richest soil, and roofs of glass may blanket 
the sunbeams round it, and abundant moist- 
ure may distil upon its leaves, but it is only 
as the plant shall itself lay hold of and make 
its own all favoring circumstance that it can 
get on. The tree clinging to the mountain- 
side, sending its roots on many a wandering 
search for nourishment amid the crevices of 
the rocks, and the tree fed and propped and 
helped — either can grow only as from itself 
there goes the power to take advantage of 
all the means of growth outlying. There 
may be possibilities for richer treehood round 
the one than round the other, but if both 
grow, they shall do it only as themselves 
seize what possibilities they have. 



1 88 The Brook in the Way. 

So it is with men. That man you call self- 
made, springing out of rocky circumstance, 
is really no more ^//"-made than the one 
whose surroundings are more propitious. 
There is, indeed, better illustration of a 
heroic energy in the first than in the last. 
There is, indeed, a heavier weight of respon- 
sibility on the last than on the first. But 
from both alike there must go forth, from 
an inherent centre, the voluntary power of 
use and assimilation. Precisely so true is 
this if a man grow bad instead of good. By 
voluntary seizure of it he extracts out of 
what surrounds him that which ministers to 
badness and builds himself up in badness. 
So all growth is ^//"-growth, all manhood is 
self-made manhood. 

It is quite impossible to define life. It is 
quite possible, however, to distinguish its 
main symptom. That main symptom of life 
is action. A living thing is an acting thing. 
The word " age " is derived from the Latin 
agere, which means to act. The Latin his- 
torian Tacitus uses this very word agere for 



The Doom of Growing. 189 

" to live." When you say a man is forty 
years of age, you really say the man has 
acted for forty years. 

But now, all the ceaseless action of the 
living subject is not without result. No man 
can act in any direction and be exactly the 
man he was before the deed was done. 
Action is but a means to an end. Power 
exerted always reacts upon the living subject 
in increase of power. Life must move out 
of some purpose toward some point, and 
the movement always leaves its result in an 
increase of tendency toward that point. In 
other words, activity reacts into growth. And 
the rapidity of the growth is in proportion 
to the intensity and concentration of the ac- 
tion. Act you must, somehow; because action 
is the invincible law of life ; and therefore, 
grow you must, somehow, because growth 
is the inevitable result of action. 

It is this which renders life such a momen- 
tous, solemn thing to us. On and on it must 
evolve forever. As long as eternity shall 
last, so long shall life remain, and with the 



190 The Brook in the Way, 

necessity of growth ever propelling in it. 
The elements shall melt with fervent heat; 
the solid world shall exhale into vacuity; the 
sun shall fall a burned-out cinder from the 
sky; the firmament shall be rolled together 
as a scroll; but the soul, the life, that shall 
be always; that shall be always growing, 
downward ever, or pressing into fuller light, 
and blessedness, and love. 

Oh, that this life which must thus go on 
growing somehow, grow rightly ! What con- 
cern so strenuously practical and important? 

If we grow up into Christ, we grow rightly. 
It is a tremendous question, Are you growing 
thus? 



TRUTHING IT. 

T is by truthing it, the apostle tells us, we 
may grow up into Him which is the head, 
even Christ. Our translation of the Greek 
word is " speaking the truth ; " but that does 
not bring out the exact meaning of the origi- 
nal. Let us coin the word — truthing it. It 
is thus, the apostle tells us, we may grow up 
into Christ. 

Truthing it involves, first, the knowledge 
of the truth. Truth is the soul's sustenance, 
nutriment, as soil, light, air, wet are the tree's 
nutriment. If I would grow rightly I must, 
somehow, get hold of the truth by which to 
grow. And now this truth by which I can 
grow rightly is Christ himself. " I am the 
truth," He says. 

Let us think a moment. In three great 
directions I want to know the truth : in the 



192 The Brook in the Way. 

direction of the conscience, of the intellect, of 
the heart. 

In the direction of the conscience. I am 
sure I never read a more appalling thing than 
I read lately of Rousseau. " No man," Rous- 
seau says, " can come to the throne of God 
and say, ' I am a better man than Rousseau.' 
Let the trumpet of the last judgment sound 
when it will, I will present myself before the 
Sovereign Judge and will say aloud, ' Here 
is what I did, what I thought, and what I 
was.' " " Ah," said he, just before he died, 
" how happy a thing it is to die when one has 
no reason for remorse or self-reproach." 
And then, addressing himself to the Al- 
mighty, he said, " Eternal Being, the soul 
that I am going to give Thee back is as pure 
at this moment as it was when it proceeded 
from Thee ; render it a partaker of Thy fel- 
icity." And this is the appalling wonder of 
it: in his boyhood Rousseau was a petty 
thief; in what he wrote he applauded adul- 
tery and suicide ; twenty years of his life were 
spent in avowed licentiousness ; his children, 



Truthing It. 193 

many, if not all, of whom were illegitimate, 
he sent off to a foundling hospital as soon as 
they were born, denying them the care of 
parenthood, glad to be rid of them ; he him- 
self was mean, treacherous, blasphemous. 
Surely it is the veriest insanity of sin to dare 
like that. The only explanation of it is that 
a doom of awful sin is awful moral blindness. 
One thing is certain — though I have by no 
means sinned as did Rousseau, I have yet 
sinned, and thus, and simply in myself, I dare 
not confront God. I am sure no man who 
is not " past feeling " would dare take his 
record and ask the infinitely holy God to 
pass upon it. 

My cavernous craving is to know if there 
be a truth of the forgiveness of sins. I can- 
not justify myself; I cannot, therefore, ex- 
pect God will justify me. Is there any ab- 
solute truth that my sin may be put away? 

Then Jesus Christ appears to me in the 
truth of His atonement. He tells me how He 
has, in my stead, satisfied the law and made 
it honorable. I learn how God made Him to 

13 



194 Th e Brook in the Way. 

be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might 
be made the righteousness of God in Him. 
I learn how, in Christ, my sin has met its ut- 
most doom ; that, therefore, if I will accept 
what Christ has done for me, my sin may, by 
a divine forgiveness, be put away. I do ac- 
cept. I do say, " Lord, in Thine own body 
Thou didst bear my sin upon the tree. I 
thank Thee. I adore Thee. I yield myself to 
Thee." And I am glad with a great gladness, 
for my conscience rests in the truth of the 
forgiveness of sins. 

But I need also truth in the direction of 
the intellect. The unknowable, the ultimate 
force, the moral order of the world, the 
power, not ourselves, which makes for right- 
eousness, — how vague all that, what a mist of 
words, what thinnest clouds wide-wandering, 
to rest my thought upon. And then about 
myself. Who am I? Whither am I going? 
What is to become of me? And is there any 
care for me on the part of the great Someone 
or Somewhat whence I and all this won- 
drous world have sprung? I want the truth. 



Truthing It. 195 

Grand phrases cannot satisfy me. Tell me 
the truth. 

Let me quote a passage from a very noble 
book I love much to read. " An apostle has 
expressed in a single phrase a peculiarity of 
Jesus which distinguished Him from all other 
men. ' In Him was Yea.' The doctrine of 
Jesus is never a question and a weary doubt; 
it is an uninterrupted affirmation. In order 
to appreciate the wonderful range of His an- 
swers and this distinctive positiveness of His 
teaching, pass quickly from one to the other 
of the verities which He points out to His 
disciples. Is there another than this earthly 
existence for us mortals? Yes. 'I am the 
resurrection and the life.' Are there other 
spheres of being? Yes. 'In my Father's 
house are many mansions.' But can man 
know the Father? Yes. 'If ye had known 
Me ye should have known my Father also ; 
and from henceforth ye know Him and have 
seen Him.' Is God thoughtful of his creat- 
ures? Yes. 'Your Father knoweth what 
things ye have need of.' Does the great 



196 The Brook in the Way. 

Creator care for me ? Yes. ' The very hairs 
of your head are all numbered/ Is prayer 
a power with God ? Yes. ' Ask and ye shall 
receive.' Will justice ever be done — justice 
now mocked and trodden under foot of men? 
Yes. ' Many that are first shall be last, and 
the last shall be first.' " And so in Jesus 
Christ my intellect gets the truth of a per- 
sonal, infinite Father, of His real relation with 
me, of a shining of His presence I may enter 
when this life is done. And I rest in Jesus 
Christ as, for my intellect, the truth. 

But I need also truth in the direction of 
the heart. And where such truth for the 
affections as in Him? He is the chiefest 
among ten thousand, the One altogether 
lovely. As the artist crowds away ugliness 
by loving and studying the great masters, 
those who are the crowned interpreters of 
beauty, so the soul, fastening itself to Christ, 
seizes for itself and fills itself with the infi- 
nitely lovely, the infinitely beautiful. 

And thus it is that Christ is the truth by 
means of which men may grow rightly, and 



Truthing It. 197 

truthing it is, first of all, the knowledge, the 
acceptance of Christ as the truth. 

But truthing it involves still another ele- 
ment, the earnest use, the sincere practice of 
the truth we know. Ah, if we would only 
truth it in this further sense of using the 
truth we get from Christ more thoroughly 
and more steadily, into what vigorous growth 
toward Him should we immediately start ! 
It is because we know of truth so vastly more 
than we use of truth that we are such stunted 
weaklings. Practice makes perfect in religion 
as in other spheres. " The end of man is an 
action and not a thought, though it were 
the noblest," says Carlyle. I think Oliver 
Cromwell one of the highest heroes ever the 
world saw. " I was," he says in his quaint way, 
" a person who from my first employment 
was suddenly preferred and lifted up from 
lesser trusts to greater, from my first being a 
captain of a troop of horse, and did labor as 
well as I could to discharge my trust; and 
God blessed me therein as it pleased him." 
And it was precisely because Oliver did labor 



198 The Brook in the Way. 

as well as he could to discharge his trust that, 
by the blessing of God's invariable law, he 
grew into England's savior, into the man who 
has changed the course of the centuries 
towards liberty for you and me. Your Chris- 
tian who knows but will not do is a grovelling 
Christian always. I think I know Christians 
who would be at once astonished at their 
growth in grace if they would but begin to 
use their grace. Everywhere this is God's 
inexorable law of growth, that we use that 
which ministers to growth. Truth it then by 
using truth, and you will find yourself im- 
mediately in a glad and stimulating spirit- 
ual summer. 



THRONGING AND TOUCHING. 

HPHE Master had just returned from the 
■*■ other side of the little lake. On this 
side He is met by a man who falls at His feet 
with a great burden on his heart, and a great 
prayer upon his lip. Yonder in the city 
his little daughter is sinking into death. He 
has done all he can for her ; but everything 
has failed. Hope has faded everywhere else ; 
it shines now only around the Master. This 
is his burden and his prayer : " My little 
daughter lieth at the point of death ; I pray 
Thee come and lay Thy hands on her that she 
may be healed, and she shall live." The 
Master, whose life was a perpetual answer to 
prayer, hears the man, yields to his cry, and 
begins to follow him. 

Meanwhile a great crowd is gathering. 
They are mustered by all the influences 



200 The Brook in the Way. 

which call a crowd, — curiosity, concern for 
the stricken sufferer, interest in the wonder- 
ful Teacher, who is so in kin with men that 
somehow they always troop to Him as the 
birds do to the summer. 

The crowd is dense and unwieldy, and 
swaying back and forth as crowds do, and 
blocking up the path, and rendering advance 
difficult. In a rude, eager way it forces itself 
against, and presses itself upon, and throngs 
and jostles Jesus walking in the centre. 

Then a woman thrusts herself through the 
mass, clearing for herself a difficult course 
through it, with a most eager and determined, 
yet withal, with a shrinking and half- fearing 
look and motion, striving to get into some 
neighborhood with Jesus. She accomplishes 
her object; she reaches forth her hand and 
touches the long fringe upon the corners 
of the Master's robe. And then, as though 
that were all she wanted, turns, hastening to 
get away. 

Now, the thing to be noticed is, that that 
touch seems to establish at once a union 



Thronging and Touching, 201 

between that woman and the Lord. The 
woman is diseased, and at the moment of 
that touch she is conscious of cure. And 
amid all the pressing and thronging of the 
crowd the Saviour recognizes the touch and 
distinguishes it; is strangely sensitive to it; 
and yields, because of it, a healing energy. 
It is as though all the crowd were absent, and 
only the Saviour and that woman stood 
together. 

"Who touched me?" asked the Saviour, 
turning around. " Did you? Did you? " 

And when all denied, Peter answers : 
" Master, the multitude throng Thee and press 
Thee. Sayest Thou, Who touched me? " 

But the Master replies : " Somebody hath 
touched me ; for I perceive that a healing 
energy hath gone forth from me." 

A relation between Christ and that woman 
has been established. There they stand 
together, in the isolation of that relation. All 
the crowd has thronged Christ; only this 
poor woman has touched Christ. They who 
throng, though, doubtless, many of them are 



202 The Brook in the Way. 

diseased, are still unhealed. The woman 
touches, and is cured at once. 

And so it must be one thing to throng 
Christ, and another thing to touch Him. 

I am sure that the multitude on the road 
there, between the Sea of Galilee and the 
City of Capernaum, with Jesus in the centre 
of it, with the multitude thronging Him, eager 
to see Him, with that poor woman pressing 
her way through that crowd to touch Him, 
establishing by that means between Himself 
and herself a most singular and deep relation 
— I am sure that this scene, which I have 
rudely sketched, is a perfect symbol and rep- 
resentation of the world to-day. 

For, say what you will, the world throngs 
Christ to-day. Say what you will, Christ is 
the centre of the world's interest and thought 
to-day. Men have tried to explain away the 
Christ. They have said He was a myth. 
They have said He was an enthusiast. They 
have said that He was only a man, possessing 
a wonderful genius for religion. They have 
brought all the enginery of criticism to bear 



Thronging and Touching. 203 

upon Him. They have devised countless 
theories to account for Him. And yet He 
stands the central fact of the world's history ; 
the grand problem for the world's solution ; 
the gathering point of the world's interest; 
the controlling force in the world's life. 

What think ye of Christ, Historian, Phil- 
osopher, Theologian, Statesman, Heterodox, 
Orthodox, Romanist, Protestant, Rationalist, 
Ritualist? What think ye of Christ? is the 
great question which the world has been ask- 
ing itself, which the world keeps asking itself, 
which the world cannot help asking itself. 
The world is thronging Christ. 

For consider the singularity and diverse- 
ness of this Christ from all others upon whom 
the sun has shone. What dignity of claim, 
what augustness of life, what grandeur of 
power ! 

He comes assuming for Himself a most 
unique position. He comes claiming to be 
something more than the founder of a new 
religion. He declares that He Himself is the 
new religion. He promulgates doctrine ; but 



204 The Brook in the Way. 

He puts himself at the centre of His doctrine. 
He brings to us revelation ; but He Himself 
is the sun whence the revealing shines. " / 
am the bread of life." " / am the good 
shepherd." " I am the resurrection and the 
life." " Come unto me and I will give you 
rest." " He that believeth in me shall have 
everlasting life." Daring like this has always 
been beyond the presumption of any man. 

He comes substantiating His claims by a 
sinless life. His life is the one thoroughly 
pure ray in the world's darkness. He stands 
before the world, bares His breast, and chal- 
lenges, Which of you convinceth me of sin? 
And the only answer which the world can 
find for the Sinless One is worship. 

He comes setting up a kingdom which 
stands larger and firmer as ages pass. " Can 
you tell me who Jesus Christ was?" asked 
Napoleon, at St. Helena. " Alexander, Caesar, 
Charlemagne, and I myself have founded 
great empires ; but upon what did these 
creations of our genius depend? Upon force. 
Jesus alone founded His empire upon love; 



Thronging and Touching. 205 

and to this very day millions would die for 
Him. I think I understand something of 
human nature, and I tell you all these were 
men, and I am a man; none else is like Him. 
Jesus Christ was more than man. I have 
inspired multitudes with such enthusiastic 
devotion that they would have died for me ; 
but to do this it was necessary that I should 
be visibly present, with the electric influence 
of my looks, of my voice, of my words. 
When I saw men and spoke to them, I lighted 
up a flame of self-devotion in their hearts. 
Christ alone has succeeded in so raising the 
mind of man toward the unseen that it be- 
comes insensible to the barriers of time and 
space. Across a chasm of eighteen hundred 
years Jesus Christ makes a demand which is, 
beyond all others, difficult to satisfy. He asks 
for the human heart ; He will have it entirely 
to Himself. He demands it unconditionally; 
and, forthwith, His demand is granted. Won- 
derful ! In defiance of time and space the 
soul of man, with all its powers and faculties, 
becomes an annexation to the empire of 



206 The Brook in the Way. 

Christ. This it is which strikes me most. I 
have often thought of it." So supreme is 
the power of Jesus over men. 

And now this Jesus Christ, this singular 
and separated being, so authoritative in claim, 
irradiate with such purity of life, so imperial 
in power, — the world cannot help thinking 
about, inquiring about, gathering around, 
thronging. Christ is in human history. 
Christ is the most stupendous fact in human 
history. As such He challenges and compels 
attention. Gather around Him in musing 
and wonder men must, — just as that crowd 
clustered around Him on the road between the 
Sea of Galilee and Capernaum. The world 
does throng Christ. 

And yet it is easy enough to see, that just 
as the presence of the Master in that crowd 
divided the multitude into two classes, those 
who throng and she who touched, so now 
to-day. Christ, as a great fact and presence, 
divides the world into two classes, — those who 
simply throng, and they who deeply touch. 

To those who touch Him Christ is vastly 



Thronging and Touching. 207 

more than He is to those who throng Him. 
There is formed between Him and them an 
intimate and personal relation. They are 
conscious of a spiritual healing through this 
touching of Him. Their need has touched 
His fulness. Their sin has touched His for- 
giveness. Their sorrow has touched His 
comfort. Their weakness has touched His 
strength. Their faith has touched His prom- 
ise. Their heart has touched His heart. 

This touching is different from the world's 
thronging. It is not mere intellectual inter- 
est ; it is not mere enthusiasm which art can 
glorify ; it is not a mere aesthetic admiration ; 
it is not merely public prayer and praise 
which may be only lip-deep. It is all this 
and something a million fathoms deeper. It 
is the closest contact and the most utter spirit- 
ual union of the human heart with the heart 
of Christ. It is along the channel of this 
touching, and not along the way of a more 
distant and careless thronging, that the heal- 
ing, helping energy of Christ flows down 
upon the needy soul. 



COMFORT FOR US. 

" " WILL not leave you comfortless," was 
-■» the Master's promise to the disciples ; 
and yet that He was going away from them 
was at the same time His distinct and reiter- 
ated word. Strange way of giving comfort, 
this going away, when just now it seemed 
to these disciples that they had but begun to 
reach up into some adequate appreciation 
of their Lord. Comfort by taking away! 
Strange method that ! 

And yet, consider: Here the disciples 
were gathered in the upper room. For three 
years, more or less, they had been in daily 
and nightly contact with Jesus. Intimacy is 
contagion. The mere presence of a bad man 
causes to spring into lustier growth the bad- 
ness in ourselves. That is a wonderful touch 
in Goethe's Faust when the as yet unstained 



Comfort For Us, 209 

Marguerite is made to ask Faust why she al- 
ways finds it so difficult to pray when his bad 
friend Mephistopheles is with him. On the 
other hand, the presence of goodness starts 
all that is best in us into more triumphant en- 
ergy. Mrs. Jameson tells in her art-legends 
how the mere coming into their company of 
the young Bernadino of Siena hushed imme- 
diately all foul words upon the lips of his 
companions. 

Now the Sinless One had been for three 
years compelling the disciples by His holy 
fascinations. Everything best in them had 
been rising into growth and bloom, as the 
flowers do beneath the tender summer skies. 
They had learned to love holiness in His 
holy presence ; and truth as it distilled to 
them from those pure lips ; and wide and 
healing charity, as they saw the Son of Man 
take all men into His great heart. And as 
more and more they had grown on toward 
perfection, more and more they had come to 
desire its presence as exemplified in Jesus, 
and to hang upon it. More and more, we 



210 The Brook in the Way. 

can see, I am sure, the actual personal bodily 
presence of perfection must have seemed to 
these disciples the life of all best in them; 
the departure of it the death of what was 
best. 

Then besides, these disciples had come ut- 
terly to believe in the Messiahship of Jesus. 
Through all the centuries prophecy had been 
speaking, and true hearts had been longing 
and listening for fulfilment. Every Hebrew 
mother cherished her boy-babe with the 
possibility thrilling through her love that he 
might be Messiah. As the sky of Israel 
darkened, as the wide kingdom which David 
set up and Solomon ruled grew narrower, as 
captivities and disasters thickened, as now at 
last the chosen people, in all their haughty 
pride of race, had become the thralls of the 
hated and oppressive Roman, the prayer for 
the Deliverer had become more intense and 
passionate. And for these disciples prophecy 
had come to fulfilment in the person of their 
Master. That Messiah had come, they were 
absolutely sure. That Jesus was Messiah, 



Comfort For Us. 211 

they were as certain. What wonderful things 
would be done ! what a glorious kingdom He 
would set up ! what high places they would 
have in it ! what proof of their wisdom and 
devotion in following the Nazarene would 
shortly appear ! They would not let them- 
selves believe that the dark things Christ 
had told them were to issue from this last 
journey to Jerusalem, really were so dark. 
They were parables, these sayings. They 
were sayings the hidden and brighter sides 
of which, glorious events would certainly 
bring out. They were on the tiptoe of 
expectation, — these disciples. 

So when to them Christ made the distinct 
announcement of His immediate departure, 
a pall, as of the midnight, fell smiting down. 
It was, to their thought, bleak disaster. It 
was a phalanx of spears transfixing hope. 

Well, Christ was going away; that was 
something settled. Whatever of personal de- 
spair the going away might bring, it was to 
be. Christ was going away. But — and 
make that but as emphatic as possible — it 



212 The Brook in the Way, 

was not to be a simple, aimless, treasureless 
going away. Rather there was the Divinest 
reason behind it. Christ was going away, but 
He was going away for something in the be- 
half of the disciples. And that which He was 
going away for, and which He could only get 
for them by going, was something inexpres- 
sibly precious for these He must leave ; was 
something inexpressibly more precious than 
His present bodily continuance with them. 
They could not see what Christ was going 
away for; they could only see the going 
away. But Christ knew what the going away 
was for, and how utterly they needed that 
which the going away would bring. Atone- 
ment, resurrection, the bestowment of the 
Holy Spirit, — these things and such as these, 
were to become the disciples' through Christ's 
departure. 

Now, I think we may get sight here of a 
very real deep principle of the Divine treat- 
ment of us ; a principle which, amid the darker 
ways into which life sometimes dips, we ought 
never to let our faith loosen its grip on, — 



Comfort For Us, 213 

this principle : that no more to us than to 
the disciples are dark things sent simply for 
the sake of sending dark things, but always 
for the high and Divine reason that the dark 
things are the necessary path toward wonder- 
fully bright and needed things. 

You are never the sport of fate. You are 
always the object of the wisest and most lov- 
ing Divine care. Oh, when, as it was with 
the disciples, the wind is contrary and we are 
toiling in rowing, to be sure of this is hope 
and energy and triumph. For to be sure of 
this is to be sure that the flinging winds and 
the tossing waves are but God's messengers 
of a better and nobler bestowment. And this 
is comfort. 



I COULD DO ANYTHING BUT 
THAT. 

A T the close of a religious service, not 
-*-*- long since, a Christian man was going 
about asking this one and the other if he 
would accept the Lord Jesus as a personal 
Saviour. The questioning had been fruitful 
of result. Several, touched by the personal 
appeal, had then and there declared they 
would end controversy and hesitancy and 
submit themselves to Jesus as their Saviour 
and their Lord. The service had thus 
amounted to a great deal. All present were 
conscious of the power of the Spirit, and 
there was much rejoicing that to the Lord's 
kingdom new adherents had been won. The 
hinge on which the service had thus swung 
toward victory had been plainly the simple 
and tender personal appeal. 



/ Could do Anything but That. 215 

The meeting done, another Christian man 
said to the one who had thus one by one be- 
sought men, " Well, I could do anything 
but that." • 

Now the precise trouble with the Lord's 
Church is, that there are such multitudes of 
her members who are so constantly saying 
they can do anything but approach men in 
the way of personal appeal ; and who seem 
to imagine that because they feel such disin- 
clination for the duty, they may therefore be 
excused from it. 

Right here is a main reason for the too 
slightly vanquishing power of the Church. 
Sermons, praises, prayers — the Church per- 
haps is ready enough for these. The general 
appeal from the pulpit, men will listen to 
this. But hand-to-hand work, Christians too 
much shirk. The loving question, from one 
man to another, Will you accept Jesus Christ? 
waits too often, baffled, upon Christian lips. 
And because a Christian man lends his pres- 
ence to religious service, prays, gives, sings, 
makes perhaps, now and then, in some public 



216 The Brook in the Way. 

meeting, a kind of set speech of exhortation, 
he imagines his duty done ; or if not that, 
that he is excused from further duty. And 
the stranger by his side goes out with never a 
personal word said, never a question concern- 
ing the true life asked, never a welcome of- 
fered. And these churches wonder why there 
are not more conversions, and think the fault 
is in the preaching, singing, order of ser- 
vice, anywhere rather than precisely where the 
fault is, — in the disposition to do anything 
but this thing, so strenuously and constantly 
needed, the personal approach of the Chris- 
tian to the unchristian. 

How prone Christians are to substitute some- 
thing other, for this duty of personal approach. 
One of the troubles with the Week of Prayer 
is that it has been thrust into such place of 
substitution. There has been little or none 
of this personal duty done in a church for a 
long year. Sermons have been preached, 
Sabbath-school lessons taught, prayer-meet- 
ings held, the formal order of services pushed 
resolutely on. Nothing much, apparently, 



/ Could do Anything but That. 217 

has come of it all. Congregations have 
come, congregations have gone. Then the 
Week of Prayer arrives. The nightly ser- 
vices are held. Men pray, and then wait for 
something with a listless expectancy; but 
wait in vain. And the church contentedly 
settles down into the conviction that the Lord 
has no special blessing for her that year. 
And the old routine goes on and on. 

Meanwhile, scarcely a member of that 
church has approached a soul unchristian 
with the question, betokening personal in- 
terest, Will not you now take for your own 
the Lord and Saviour? Ah, me! I am sure 
the showers of grace are ready to fall, but 
there has been so little personal seed-sowing 
which such showers could stir and fructify, 
why should they fall? This " I-can-do-any- 
thing-but-that " feeling is the main blight 
and barrier. 

When Christian men and women begin to 
recognize the duty of a personal service, all 
weeks will be weeks of special blessing, and 
every service will be a triumph for the Lord. 



218 The Brook in the Way. 

11 For you must know, Mr. Lewis, it is a rule 
in our church that when one brother has 
been converted he must go and fetch another 
brother; and when a sister has been con- 
verted' she must go and fetch another sister. 
That is the way one hundred and twenty of 
us have been brought from atheism and from 
Popery to simple faith in the Lord Jesus 
Christ." So said a member of one of the 
struggling Protestant churches in Paris. And 
struggling though it is, that church is tri- 
umphant, because personal service is thus 
rendered. 

Nothing can take the place of this personal 
duty. Many a church which men call pros- 
perous, and which is prosperous in external 
ways — in congregations, easy finances, large 
gifts — is terribly weak and languishing spirit- 
ually, because to so great degree its members 
are willing to do anything but make personal 
approach to others for Jesus's sake. What a 
record of spiritual poverty it is, and a record 
so often made that the making it seems to be a 
kind of matter of course, — a church with, say, 



Could do Anything but That, 219 

five hundred members, and with additions 
by conversions of from a half-dozen to a 
dozen in a whole year. The reason is plain. 
The hindrance does not lie in God, it does 
lie in that church. As a general basis the 
membership is willing to do anything but 
search out men, one by one, and personally 
and lovingly press Christ on them. 

Krumacher tells a legend about a man 
named Eliab. He was rich. He was cun- 
ning in all the wisdom of the East. But he 
knew no peace. His heart was black with 
sorrow, and he often wished to die. 

Then a man of God brought him an herb 
full of wonderful healing power. 

But Eliab answered : " What is that to 
me? My body lacks not health. It is my 
soul that is diseased. It were better for me 
to die." 

" But take the herb," said the man of God, 
" and heal with it seven sick men ; then thou 
mayest die, if thou wilt." 

So Eliab was persuaded. He sought out 
misery. With his wealth he succored the 



220 The Brook in the Way. 

poor. By the healing herb he brought health 
to seven sick. 

Then the man of God came to him again 
and said : " Here now is an herb of death. 
Take it; for now thou mayest die." 

But Eliab answered : " God forbid. My 
soul longeth no more for death. For now 
I comprehend the meaning and the use of 
life." 

We should not only have a rejoicing multi- 
tude of saved souls to thank God for, but we 
should also have multitudes of glad, strong, 
hopeful Christian souls, if only more Chris- 
tians were willing to take for themselves and 
apply to others this healing herb of a per- 
sonal service. 

That Christian is in a sorry state when he 
lets master him this feeling, that he can do 
anything but use himself in the way of per- 
sonal speech to individual men about his 
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Sadly does 
he need some healing herb. 



SUGGESTIONS FROM A BIT OF 
GRASS. 

TT7HEN in the bright June weather the 
* * grass is growing green beneath our 
feet, let us see if it may have any helpful sig- 
nificance for us. Evidently our Lord thought 
it ought to have. He tells us it ought to 
teach us the lesson of a particularizing Provi- 
dence. " Wherefore, if God so clothe the 
grass of the field," says Jesus, " which to-day 
is and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall 
He not much more clothe you, O ye of little 
faith?" The Divine furnishing of the grass 
below us is Christ's argument up to the Di- 
vine furnishing of ourselves. If God takes 
such care of the grass He surely will take 
care of us, so much better than the grass we 
tread on. 

Consider, then, some of the ways in which 
God makes special provision for the grass. 



222 The Brook in the Way. 

Look at the grass-root. See how tenacious 
it is, and fibrous. Notice how along its joints 
fringes of rootlets are out-thrust. Mark its 
vitality, so that though you hack at it and 
cut it, you but seem to give it greater vigor, 
and the larger opportunity of spreading 
through the soil and seizing it. The grass 
bears seed, indeed, but very frequently it is 
prevented from its seed-bearing. But per- 
fect provision is made against this so often 
hindrance of seed-bearing. That provision 
is found in these tough and vital roots, and 
in the fringes of rootlets with which they are 
supplied. When the seed capsules are de- 
stroyed, the roots hurry to make up for the 
deficiency, and turn. their rootlets into roots, 
and thrust up from themselves fresh green 
shoots, and so the cropping and the reaping 
but mats the grass more thickly, and weaves 
into compacter mass the grateful greenness. 

Consider the stem of the grass, — what is 
called its culm. You remember that Galileo 
was confined in the dungeons of the Inquisi- 
tion for teaching, what the Romish Church 



Suggestions from a Bit of Grass. 223 

was pleased to call the heresy, that the world 
moves. Lying there in his dungeon, he was 
visited by a priest who accused him of athe- 
ism. Galileo took from the floor of the 
dungeon a wheaten straw, — wheat, you know, 
belongs to the family of the grasses,' — and ex- 
plaining the mechanical and scientific princi- 
ples disclosed in the structure of this stem of 
wheat, told the priest that this stem was 
evidence, to his mind, of the existence of 
God. " If," said Galileo, " this wheaten 
straw, which supports an ear heavier than its 
whole stalk, were made of the same quantity 
of material disposed in a solid form, it would 
make but a poor, thin, and wiry stem which 
would be snapped in the slightest breeze; its 
tubular form gives to it the necessary degree 
of strength, and preserves it from destruc- 
tion." Very wonderful the evidences of the 
Divine design in the stems of grasses. The 
iron columns which support the weighty roof 
and large galleries of a great church are not 
solid, they are hollow. Being hollow they 
are stronger. All along their hollow lengths 



224 The Brook in the Way. 

you get the principle of the arch restraining 
any tendency to break from slight deflection, 
or special strain, on this side or that. So the 
stems of grasses are hollow, and being hollow, 
Hke the wheat stem, are able to bear up tri- 
umphantly an ear more weighty than the 
stem itself. And when they are pressed, 
now on this side and now on that, by the 
summer breezes, the arch opposing on the 
other side prevents their snapping off. But 
then, besides, this hollowness is not continu- 
ous. It is interrupted by partitions. At 
these nodes, as they are called, the leaves 
are hung. And these partitions give added 
strength to the tubular stems. And then, 
besides, all along the hollow stem, and in the 
leaves as well, little bits of flinty silex are dis- 
persed. So plentiful is this silex, that the 
stem may be burned, or destroyed by strong 
acids, and yet the silicious skeleton of the 
grass remain. These bits of silex lend their 
toughness and resistance to the grass. They 
are, in a sense, the grass's bones. So here 
in the stem of the grass there is the most 



Suggestions from a Bit of Grass. 225 

marked evidence of the most particular Di- 
vine thoughtfulness providing against various 
contingency. 

Consider the leaves of the grass. Let 
another describe them. " They are spear- 
shaped, and strongly ribbed with threads of 
flinty fibre, thus forming wedges admirably 
fitted for forcing their way with the least 
resistance through the soil ; they are long, 
narrow, alternate, and sheathing the stem for 
a considerable distance, in order to present 
as small a surface and give as light a hold as 
possible to the wind; they are destitute of 
branches, so as to qualify them for growing 
together in masses without suffering from want 
of air and light." And that they may have 
air enough, matted together as they are, their 
surfaces are numerously punctured with air- 
holes permitting the freest entrance of the air. 

Consider the flower of the grass, — for 
grasses bear flowers, though they are so in- 
conspicuous we do not much notice them. 
How human life hangs on the flower of the 
grass which we name wheat. Out from the 

is 



226 The Brook in the Way. 

horny sheath protecting the wheat-flower, as 
the green calyx protects the rose, dangle, in 
the flowering time, three delicate white hairs ; 
on the ends of these hairs hang little knobs of 
anthers, and these anthers are sprinkled all 
over with the yellow pollen-dust. It is on 
these tenuous hairs that our human life hangs. 
For these pollen-weighted anthers, hung on 
these frail hairs, beaten by the breezes, shake 
off their pollen, and the pollen falling on the 
stamens of the wheat-flowers, fructifies the 
seed, and makes it fat and full, that it may 
give bread to the eater. What delicate de- 
sign in the flower of the grass. 

And the argument is this : If God take 
such particular care, in root and stem and 
leaf and flower, of the grass of the field, giv- 
ing to each unit in the countless company 
of the grasses the particularizing care it needs, 
may you not be sure that He will take par- 
ticularizing care of you, — of you, so vastly 
lordlier than the grasses, O ye of little 
faith? And we very much need this argu- 
ment, springing from such small things as the 



Suggestions from a Bit of Grass, 227 

grasses of the field, to make vigorous our 
faith in the particularizing Providence of God. 
For, instinctively, we associate with God the 
thought of greatness. The earth, " rock- 
ribbed and ancient as the sun ; " the sun, blaz- 
ing in the heavens millions of miles away, 
and yet with such an energy that all life hangs 
upon his beams ; the light, that leaps to us 
from him at the rate of one hundred and 
ninety-two thousand miles a second ; the 
midnight heavens, sown with their starry sys- 
tems, — with such great things we think the 
great God may well be occupied. But our 
notion of greatness is always too much one 
of the vast and large. We associate too 
much mere bulk with greatness. So it gets 
to be difficult to believe that the great God, 
occupied with such great things, can care- 
fully concern Himself with such slight matters 
as our single human lives and circumstances 
and destinies. 

What we need is to have our notions of 
greatness corrected. We need to see that 
there may be greatness in the small as well 



228 The Brook in the Way, 

as in the large. We need to look beneath 
our feet as well as above our heads. We 
need to get a notion of a Divine greatness 
so great that it can — not only fashion worlds, 
and kindle suns, and set the stars in awful dis- 
tance — but that it can also lavish particular 
attention on the structure and form and fur- 
nishing of the bit of grass we tread on. And 
beholding here that God is so great that He 
will not neglect one of the countless spears of 
grass beneath us, it is then easier for us to 
think of Him as certainly refusing to neglect 
His nobler creatures who stand upon the 
lowly grass; it is then easier for us to grasp 
the mighty consolation and girding of a God 
who will surely minister a particularizing 
Providence toward each one of ourselves. 

This is really a majestic and conclusive 
argument from God's manifest care of a blade 
of grass to His therefore certain and special- 
izing care of each one of ourselves. We im- 
mensely need the conviction of it and the 
comfort of it in these lives of ours. Some 
time since I got a letter telling of failure of 



Suggestions from a Bit of Grass. 229 

faith right here, — how when the skies were 
bright, and the sun of success was shining, 
two of God's children had believed in God, 
in His special care of them ; but how, when 
afterwards those skies were clouded and that 
sun could not be seen shooting his beams 
through disastrous mists, they thought God 
did not care, had forgotten them, or had 
never thought of them. Amid the necessities 
of moral discipline, in the hard places into 
which the necessities of moral discipline must 
sometimes thrust us, — that we may be kept 
and held, — it is our utmost need thaf we do 
not let go this sheet-anchor of God's partic- 
ularizing Providence, this certainty that God 
does care, does think of us, does Himself ap- 
point the discipline. And that we may hold 
to and be held by this sheet-anchor, we are 
to follow Christ's bidding and listen to the 
teaching of the grasses beneath our feet. 
" Wherefore if God so clothe the grass of the 
field, which to-day is and to-morrow is cast 
into the oven, shall He not much more clothe 
you, O ye of little faith? " 



230 The Brook in the Way. 

A spear of grass, if you will but really use 
it, use it thoughtfully as Christ meant you 
should, — a spear of grass, is it not a weapon 
which can surely slay the giants of our dis- 
trust? A blade of grass — when you thought- 
fully investigate it, is it not vocal to you of 
this most precious and sustaining doctrine of 
the particularizing Providence of God? 



A TOO COMMON NOTION. 

T is a very common notion, and one than 
which I know of none more charged with 
moral hurtfulness, that God does not require 
of a man any more than that which he has 
the present ability to render. " God only 
asks of you what you can at present do," men 
say. Men say it, and though they may think 
it true, they affirm a falsehood. . 

So a man goes on imagining God will not 
be very exacting in His demands of complete 
obedience because the man does not have a 
present ability of complete obedience. There 
are, for example, multitudes of men who al- 
low themselves in the constant commission of 
profanity, who are under the thrall of this 
falsehood. Certainly the great law of God 
declares against profanity. But men fre- 
quently affirm they have gotten themselves 



232 The Brook in the Way. 

into such a habit of it that they cannot help 
it; that they utter it before they think; it 
has become a second nature to them ; they 
do it unconsciously; they " do not mean any- 
thing by it." And I have known men, who 
had thus allowed profane speech to get a 
hold on them, who blindly thought that their 
inability of reverent speech was a sort of ex- 
cuse which God would take account of, and 
that the awful demand of reverent speech by 
God's great law would somehow lessen its 
distinct exact requirements in their case. So 
men often also make the excuse and plea of 
disposition in the presence of God's scruti- 
nizing law. 

It is wrong to be proud and unconciliatory ; 
it is wrong to be stubborn when one finds 
himself manifestly in the wrong. Ah ! that 
was a great sentence I met from Daniel Web- 
ster some time since, " He who is not wise 
enough to be always right should be wise 
enough to change his course when he finds 
himself in the wrong." It is wrong to be 
passionate and irritable and flashing with de- 



A Too Common Notion. 233 

nunciation and stabbing with sharp and angry 
words ; this selfish pride, this stubbornness, 
this passionateness, are manifest fractures of 
the divine and holy law. But men say, " My 
disposition is proud, or stubborn, or passion- 
ate," which is the same thing as saying they 
have not the ability to be otherwise ; and they 
somehow think their disposition an excuse, 
because of which the grasp of the Divine de- 
mand and law will at least a little lessen. 

But let us take a case and see if this plea 
and fact of inability can ever, in any wise, 
cause the majestic law of God to minify its 
demands and " let off" a sinner. Let us 
listen to this confession of Charles Lamb as 
he bewails the tyranny of drink : " The waters 
have gone over me. But out of the black 
depths, could I be heard, I would cry out to 
all those that have but set foot in the perilous 
flood. Could the youth, to whom the flavor 
of the first wine is delicious as the opening 
scenes of life or the entering upon some 
newly-discovered Paradise, look into my deso- 
lation and be made to understand what a 



234 The Brook in the Way. 

dreary thing it is when a man shall feel him- 
self going down a precipice with open eyes 
and a passive will, to see his destruction and 
have no power to stop it, and yet to feel it all 
the way emanating from himself; could he 
see my fevered eye, feverish with last night's 
drinking and feverishly looking for to-night's 
repetition of the folly ; could he feel the body 
of death out of which I cry, hourly with 
feebler outcry, to be delivered, it would be 
enough to make him dash the sparkling bev- 
erage to the earth in all the pride of its mant- 
ling temptation." 

But because Charles Lamb, by yielding to 
the fascinations of bad appetite, had induced 
in himself such inability to resist its tyranny, 
can it therefore be supposed, is it in the na- 
ture of things possible to suppose, that that 
self-induced inability can make the great and 
awful law of God less severe against even 
the gentle Elia? No, the law remains; and 
the law remains demanding, notwithstanding 
inability. 

Said one once who had allowed himself to 



A Too Common Notion. 235 

become the victim of the opium habit, " If I 
should see a piece of opium on the table be- 
fore me, and between it and me a knife was 
flashing backward and forward with the rapid- 
ity of lightning, and I knew that if I reached 
for the opium the knife would cut off my 
fingers, I could not resist the temptation; I 
should try for the opium." 

But would such self-induced inability to 
resist the temptation make God's law against 
such self-destroying slavery less severe and 
less terrifically stern? No, the law remains, 
and remains demanding. 

Read the great Scripture, " For Christ is 
the end of the law for righteousness to every 
one that believeth," if you would find the 
place of your true help. Your inability, self- 
induced and wilful, cannot excuse ; but Christ's 
complete obedience in your behalf can be- 
come the reason of your forgiveness. And 
when, confessing your sin and helplessness, 
you take by faith His obedience and thus 
make it yours, you have opened your heart 
also for the entrance of the Holy Spirit, who 



236 The Brook in the Way, 

will work a " new creation " in you and give 
you daily and triumphant aid against the bad 
and tyrannizing tendencies you have induced 
within yourself by sin. Your hope and help 
is not in the foolish thought that your slavery 
to sin will let you slip the grasp of the de- 
manding law; it is in the Christ who has 
satisfied the law for you and " made it honor- 
able," and who will make a new man of you 
if you will let Him. 



IN THE WAY OF DUTY, AND YET 
STORMS. 

" A ND straightway Jesus constrained his 
-£~JL disciples to get into a ship and to go 
before Him unto the other side." Certainly 
these disciples, getting into the boat and pul- 
ling for the shore yonder, were in the way of 
duty if men ever were ; they were doing 
precisely what Christ had commanded them ; 
and yet against them came hurtling and baf- 
fling the storm, which, with all their seamen's 
craft, they could make no head against until 
Christ came to make the sea quiet for them. 

A very real and deep lesson for life here, 
I have often thought; namely, that storms 
are very apt to break upon us even though 
we are in the way of duty. 

This is a lesson we have constant need of 
learning. We are very apt to forget it. I do 



238 The Brook in the Way. 

not know a commoner practical heresy than 
the forgetting it. We all the time associate 
blue skies and smooth seas and whist winds 
with the way of duty, and are so constantly 
smitten with ' great surprise if we do not 
always find them going together. 

In a profound inner sense the way of duty 
is that of sunny skies and pleasant seas and 
whist winds. The way of duty is the way 
of a quiet conscience; and there is no sun- 
shine so radiant and there are no seas so 
unvexed as are the inner sun and sea of an 
approving conscience, of the recognition and 
practice of the right. The ways of wisdom 
are ways of pleasantness and her paths are 
paths of peace in this spiritual, high, holy, 
secret sense. 

But it does not follow that the track of 
duty will never lead you into external storm, 
that the tempest of opposition will never 
beat, that the waves of trial will never rise 
and threaten and dash their bewildering 
crests into your boat of life, that the be- 
steadings of a difficult discipline must not 



The Way of Duty, and yet Storms. 239 

put you to your oars and call out your 
strength and summon your skill and sea- 
craft to its wariest and wisest use. It does 
not follow that God will not, in His best time 
and way, set storms to making a man of you, 
even though you are precisely and con- 
sciously in the way of duty. 

What was true of these disciples, that 
doing the right they were set against by 
storms, has been always true of all the saints 
of God. It is worth noticing how thoroughly 
the Bible is against this so usual practical 
heresy of ours, — that duty and storms are 
not to be found together. 

Abraham was certainly in the way of duty 
when he got out of his country and from 
his kindred and from his father's house into 
the land that God should show him, as God 
ordered him. And yet how he met the 
storm of famine, and the storm of Lot's sel- 
fishness, and the storm of the long delay 
about the promised birth of Isaac, and the 
storm of the sacrifice of Isaac upon Mt. 
Moriah ! 



240 The Brook in the Way. 

Moses was certainly in the way of duty 
when, according to the command of God, 
he went to lead forth the Israelites from 
Egypt. And yet how he met the storm of 
the hard-heartedness of Pharaoh, and the 
storm of the murmuring of the people, — 
even after he had led them through the 
Red Sea and they had seen Pharaoh over- 
swept by the returning waters, — and the 
storm of the idolatry of the people when 
even Aaron set them to dancing round a 
golden calf, and the storm of the pitiable 
faithlessness of the people when Moses had 
brought them to the very edge of the 
promised land, and they would not go in 
because, they said, they were nothing but 
grasshoppers compared with the sons of 
Anak! 

Daniel was certainly in the way of duty 
when he administered the Persian kingdom 
with such questionless integrity that not even 
the dogs of envy could get scent of the least 
wrong, and when, as his wont was, he opened 
his window toward Jerusalem three times a 



The Way of Duty, and yet Storms, 241 

day and kneeled upon his knees and prayed 
and gave thanks before his God. And yet 
how he met the storm of the lions' den ! 

Stephen was certainly in the way of duty 
when he stood forth, with never the least 
blanching jon his cheek or a quiver in his 
voice, and declared the crucified Messiah to 
the Sanhedrim. And yet how he met the 
whelming storm of his martyrdom ! 

And Paul was certainly in the way of duty 
when he passed restlessly to Jerusalem, to 
Antioch, to Lystra, to Derbe, to Ephesus, to 
Corinth, to Athens, to Rome, preaching the 
Lord Jesus. And yet what storms did he 
not meet ! How they raged against him ! 
He tells us how the tempests . howled and 
with what strain of strength he had to row 
against them. " Of the Jews five times re- 
ceived I forty stripes save one; thrice was 
I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice 
I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I 
have been in the deep ; in journeyings often, 
in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in 
perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by 

16 



242 The Brook in the Way. 

the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in 
the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils 
among false brethren ; in weariness and pain- 
fulness, in watchings often, in hunger and 
thirst, in fastings often, in cold and naked- 
ness." 

Storms often strike in the way of duty. 
Even the Master met the storm of the cross 
in the way of the Father's will. 

Yes, it is surely true ; though you are in 
the way of duty you must meet storms. Not 
always waters lying still beneath the sunlight 
and the moonlight; not always easy rowing; 
not always the quick reaching of the desired 
haven. 

Take this for your comfort when, serving 
God the best you know and keeping the 
prow of your boat of life pointed along the 
line of the Divine command, you find your- 
self smitten by the storms, — take this for 
your comfort : there is for you a Vision and 
a Presence ! I think those are most sweet 
words which Mark, in his graphic way, has 
not forgotten to tell us about this storm, 



The Way of Duty, and yet Storms, 243 

" And He saw them toiling in rowing." No 
storm flares and plunges outside the circle of 
the Divine Vision. " It is I ; be not afraid ; " 
» the Divine One is with you in the storm. 

When your babe slips out of your arms, 
and the cradle is empty, and your home 
is desolate, and your heart; when you are 
drenched in the black waters and the sky is 
crowded with awful clouds and the sun seems 
to have caught back and hidden in his quiver 
every straggling arrow of his beams, and you 
are scared and helpless in the darkness and 
the terror, He is with you in the black mo- 
ments ; He is with you as you fall over your 
child's coffin and are too weak even to try to 
pray. 

When the times are hard, and you are 
pulling at the oar of business, but can make 
no headway and reach no haven ; when you 
think you must go down amid the waters, 
and the third hour has come, and you are 
utterly discouraged and almost too worn and 
anxious to pull another stroke, — He is not 
distant from you ; He is walking beside you 



244 The Brook in the Way. 

on the ridges of the waves ; He knows how 
the storm is blowing and the very propitious 
instant in which to come to your relief. 

When you are struggling against temp- 
tation, when its winds seem mightier than 
your utmost effort, — you will master drink, 
you say, impurity, bad companionship ; and 
you are rowing hard and well to do it. But 
there come to all such strugglers third hours 
in the night, when they are at the failing-point 
and temptation is at the highest. You must 
meet the storm ; but He is right there at your 
side. Oh, listen for His voice ! hear His re- 
assuring words, " It is I ; be not afraid." You 
are not alone. You will not be left. He will 
come. He does come. He is with you. 

Storms do often break in the way of duty. 
But amid them there is always the comfort of 
the Divine Vision and the Divine Presence. 



NO DIFFERENCE. 

IT is God's thought of things, not my 
thought of things, which represents the 
truth of things. It is very possible that I 
may be mistaken ; it is impossible that God 
should be mistaken. " You say," said the 
Emperor Trajan to Rabbi Joshua, " that your 
God is everywhere, and you boast that He 
resides specially in your nation. Show me 
your God." Answered Rabbi Joshua, " God 
is everywhere, but He cannot be seen; no 
mortal eye can behold His glory." But the 
emperor insisted. " Well," said Rabbi Joshua, 
" look first at one of God's ambassadors." 
The emperor assented. Forth into the noon 
the rabbi took the emperor and bade him 
look upon the sun. " But I cannot," said 
Trajan; "the light dazzles me." Answered 
the rabbi, " Thou art unable to bear the light 



246 The Brook in the Way. 

of one of God's creations ; how then couldst 
thou behold His face and live?" Certainly 
He who dwells in such light that of Him the 
dazzling sun is but partial and poor reflection 
cannot dwell amid the mists of possible mis- 
take. Will you look a moment, then, at God's 
thought of things? 

It is toward universal man the apostle 
Paul points the artillery of his tremendous 
Epistle to the Romans. For the apostle all 
mankind grouped itself in but two classes, 
Jew and Gentile. The argument of the open- 
ing chapters of the great Epistle is that both 
Gentile and Jew have sinned. The levelling, 
startling conclusion is there stated in the 
twenty-second and twenty-third verses of the 
third chapter, "For there is no difference; 
for all have sinned and come short of the 
glory of God." This, then, as uttered by the 
inspired apostle, is God's thought of the wide 
human plight: "There is no difference." 

You say, bs men do constantly, " Is that 
true? I cannot see it to be true. It is the 
plainest fact of life that among men there is 



No Difference. 247 

difference." I think the answer is, In your 
sense you may be right ; there is difference. 
In the apostle's sense, however, you are 
wrong; there is no difference. 

In your sense there is difference. There is 
difference in natural endowment: one man 
is born with a brighter brain than another. 
There is difference in environment. Have 
you never felt your heart swell and gladden 
with gratitude, as you have walked amid the 
squalor of the poorer quarters of some great 
city, that you were not born into the sur- 
roundings of these poor children, whose school 
and playground is the narrow street, and whose 
home is only a garret in a tenement-house? 
God pity such ! I am sure He does. But 
how different the surroundings of your child- 
hood. I do not think, amid such scenes, a 
man can help asking himself, " Who maketh 
thee to differ? " " God," is the only answer. 

There is difference as to culture. Mr. Big 
Ox, a chief of the Crow Indians, whom I used 
to know, thought there never was a braver or 
a brighter hero to be seen than himself when 



248 The Brook in the Way. 

he had painted one cheek yellow and the 
other green and his nose vermilion, and when 
he had put about himself his buckskin war- 
jacket, splashed with various hues, and had 
hung about his neck a lot of pewter medals 
and some claws of the grizzly bear. You 
would laugh at him, if you did not pity 
him, because you are civilized, while he is 
barbarous. 

There is also difference as to sorts of sins. 
Bill Sykes, in Mr. Dickens's novel of " Oliver 
Twist," has not lived only in that novel. Mr. 
Dickens only painted a too common picture 
of what is too often true in this sad world 
when he drew Bill Sykes. Nancy, at once so 
strangely true and so sadly false, Bill Sykes 
slew in a passion on that dark night, you re- 
member. He could not stand the presence 
of the dead when the morning came, and 
though he fled to Islington and then to High- 
gate Hill and then to Hampstead Heath and 
then to Hendon and then to Hatfield and then 
on and on, it seemed to him as though the 
sun told all men of his awful deed, and that 



No Difference, 249 

her poor ghost was as palpable to their sight 
as it was to his own. Men have sinned as 
Bill Sykes did. But you have not so sinned. 
No. There is difference among men in sorts 
of sins. 

And yet, in the apostle's sense and as God 
sees things, it is also true there is no differ- 
ence. I remember another uses the illustra- 
tion, and it comes to me to use it in my 
fashion as I think of what I saw the other 
summer. If you pass along Whitehall in 
London, you shall see there through all the 
hours of the day, from six to six, two soldiers 
under covered archways, sitting upon coal- 
black horses. They are most resplendent 
fellows as they sit there, with their plumes 
and burnished breast-plates and shining arms 
and red coats and white leather breeches and 
polished boots. It is like the flash of a rain- 
bow to see a company of them ride along the 
street. They are the Horse Guards, the elite 
corps of the British army. But it is the law 
of that army that every man to join that 
corps must be six feet and over. Here is the 



250 The Brook in the Way. 

recruiting officer, and here are some young 
Englishmen who think they will enlist. One 
measures five feet eight, but he cannot enlist. 
Here is another who measures five feet nine, 
but he cannot enlist. Here is another meas- 
uring five feet ten; he cannot enlist. Here 
is another still whose height is five feet eleven 
and a half, but he cannot enlist. Six feet or 
over is the law. There is difference among 
these fellows as to stature ; there is no dif- 
ference among them as to want of ability to 
enlist in the elite corps, for they all come short. 
I have gone down hundreds of feet into a 
Colorado silver mine, and looked down a good 
deal farther. Here is a man at work down 
there, two thousand feet below the surface of 
the earth. I have stood on the top of Mt. 
Washburne in the Yellowstone National Park, 
ten thousand feet above the level of the sea. 
Between that man down there in that mine 
and me on the summit of Mt. Washburne 
there is a difference of twelve thousand feet, 
and that, as to altitude, is a good deal of dif- 
ference. But as far as touching the stars is 



No Difference. 251 

•concerned there is no difference whatever 
between us, for both he and I are helplessly 
unable to do that. 

Now right here is where the " no differ- 
ence " appears. The sublime, holy, exact, 
unchangeable law of God, no man is able to 
touch and answer that with an exact obedi- 
ence, for every man is in some sort a sinner. 
All men are helpless, then, toward the perfect 
keeping of God's perfect law. As to this 
there is no difference. There may be differ- 
ence as to endowment, surroundings, culture, 
sorts of sins ; but as to sin, as to the fact that 
all men by sin have made their arms too short 
to touch and keep that white and changeless 
law, there is no difference. That is God's 
thought of things. That is the truth of things. 
There is no difference among men as to the 
breaking of God's law, and so as to the im- 
possibility of justification by means of the 
awful law. 

No difference — this is the solemn fact. 
Therefore the need of an atonement. There- 
fore the irreversible necessity that men, among 



252 The Brook in the Way. 

whom there is no difference, accept by faith 
that atonement, and so, by God's good grace, 
enter into justification " apart from the deeds 
of the law." Ah ! friend, sinner, like all, are 
you miserably measuring yourself by others 
when others are not the standard, and so 
thinking that because you have not so much 
come short you can get on and through? 
Do not fill your eyes with the mist of your 
thought of things. Behold God's thought of 
things. There is no difference. Flee to 
Jesus. 



OF NOT GOING ON. 

THAT is a significant incident in Old 
Testament history, of King Joash and 
Elisha. In those old times hostilities were 
often declared by the formal discharging of 
an arrow toward an enemy. Syria had been 
the constant and encroaching foe of Israel 
and had lately been pressing sorely. After 
sixty years of ministry the prophet Elisha 
is dying. King Joash pays the respect of 
a personal visit to the sick and aged man. 
"Take bow and arrows," says the dying 
prophet to the king. And the king took 
unto him bow and arrows. " Make thine 
hand to ride upon the bow," commands the 
prophet. And the king laid arrow on bow, 
and set its notch against the string as though 
he were about to shoot. And Elisha put his 



254 The Brook in the Way. 

hands upon the king's hands; thus would 
the prophet show that what was being done 
was being done by Divine direction. " Open 
the window eastward," orders the prophet. 
And the lattice was flung apart. " Shoot ! " 
commands Elisha. And the king sped the 
arrow. And as the arrow flew, the prophet 
made formal declaration of war and of suc- 
cess in it against encroaching Syria, — " the 
arrow of the Lord's deliverance from Syria, 
for thou shalt smite the Syrians in Aphek 
till thou hast consumed them." 

But the king had still a quiver full of 
arrows. " Take them," says the prophet. 
And the king gathered them into his hand. 
" Smite upon the ground," orders the prophet, 
— that is to say, In token of determined and 
vanquishing war, through the open lattice, 
shoot arrow after arrow till all are gone, and 
they remain there smiting into and sticking 
in the ground as symbols of a dauntless 
purpose. And the king shot one arrow, and 
it smote the ground. And the king shot 
the second arrow, and it smote the ground. 



Of Not Going On. 255 

And the king shot the third arrow, and it 
smote the ground. 

And then, listlessly, or unzealously, or faith- 
lessly, the king stopped. 

" And he smote thrice and stayed." 

" And the man of God was wroth with him, 
and said, ' Thou shouldst have smitten five 
or six times, then hadst thou smitten Syria 
till thou hadst consumed it; whereas now 
thou shalt smite Syria but thrice." 

Ah, not going ofi> only half doing, not 
pushing to the finishing in grand faith and 
unrelaxing purpose, — is not that the trouble 
with multitudes of men? 

But it is hard, men say. I have smitten 
three times ; I have in a measure overcome 
the Syrians ; I have achieved somewhat, — 
not what I meant, I grant, not the fulness 
of the young ambition that once thrilled 
me. But I have smitten thrice, and now to 
go on smiting still, is hard work and weary. 
Yes, it is hard. But what of that? Every- 
thing that gets up in this world must struggle 
up. No oak ever became like Cowper's oak 



256 The Brook in the Way. 

at Yardley that only struggled through three 
seasons and then stopped. Arago, the great 
French astronomer, tells in his autobiogra- 
phy, how once, in his young days, he was 
utterly puzzled and discouraged over his 
mathematics. He was holding a paper-bound 
text-book in his hand. Dimly through the 
cover some writing showed. Urged by curi- 
osity, he dampened the cover and carefully 
unrolled the leaf. It turned out to be a brief 
letter from D'Alembert to a young man dis- 
couraged over mathematics, as, just then, he 
was. The letter was in this fashion : " Go 
on, sir; go on. The difficulties you meet 
will resolve themselves as you advance ; pro- 
ceed, and light will dawn with increasing 
clearness upon your path." Well, it was the 
going on that made Arago the astronomer. 
The Syrians of difficulty had been too many 
for him had he smitten only thrice. 

" But I am too old," men often say. " Life 
with me has passed its crest; I have smitten 
my three times in life ; I can smite no more ; 
my hand must stay itself." Well, — how con- 



Of Not Going On, 257 

stantly does experience declare it, — if you 
want to bring upon yourself the very help- 
lessness and senility of age just do that, stop 
smiting. Use is the law of growth. And 
use is as thoroughly the law of conservation. 
Cease the going on, refuse to use yourself, 
and every added year, instead of being an 
added force, will be an added burden. Glad- 
stone, Bismarck, Whittier, Dr. McCosh, Mr. 
Bancroft, are strong still and affluent of ser- 
vice, though the shadows lengthen round 
them. And why? They have not ceased 
dealing vigorous strokes. How powerful is 
age when age will keep on acting. And, by 
the way, that word " age " means literally to act. 
When you say a man is seventy years of age, 
you really say a man has acted for seventy 
years. And that man is the best man on 
that verge who has really kept on acting for 
high things and true. He is free from rust; 
smoothly, still, and vigorously his powers 
work. And experience nobly won and no- 
bly used — what benediction like the tender, 
glorious colors of a June sunset ! 

17 



258 The Brook in the Way. 

One of the saddest things I know is to see 
a man, when the shadows of life begin to 
lengthen, — and often before they begin to 
lengthen when a man yet stands in the noon 
of a noble prime — begin to loosen his hold 
on things (men are most apt to do it from 
religious things, church work, etc.), withdraw 
personal interest, fling off burdens, get out 
of relation with beneficent enterprise, refuse 
this going on, stop smiting. Necessarily this 
means cessation of growth, narrowing of use- 
fulness, a swift and sure decay of power. 

I was walking once, looking for the evi- 
dences of the coming spring. I passed 
two trees standing side by side on the crest 
of a hill. One of them in every branch 
and limb and twig was in evident and 
full relation with the spring. You could 
see the beginning swelling of the leaf-buds, 
and you could not help marking that pecu- 
liar and beautiful thickening of their tracery. 
It was not difficult to see that that tree would 
soon be glorious with green banners. But 
the other tree had begun the refusing to go 



Of Not Going On. 259 

on; the buds were swelling but here and 
there, on a few twigs amid a multitude of 
dead branches. In great part that tree had 
withdrawn itself from the vivifying spring 
airs. Manifestly it had " retired." It is but 
poor and meagre life that even June can 
bring to it. 

The only way to live strongly is to act 
strongly, to persistently keep in relation with 
things, to welcome duties and burdens as the 
best medicine, to refuse to smite but thrice 
and stay. 

Many a minister wonders why he has 
reached the dead line. The reason is plain 
enough. He has smitten but thrice and 
stayed. He is no longer an alert student. 
He is chopping over old straw. He is 
preaching old sermons as a habit. Well, if 
he will do so, he is himself drawing the 
dead line about himself. 

Here, too, is the trouble with much of 
Christian experience. Men get no further 
than forgiveness ; they do not keep on smit- 
ing toward achievement of Christian char- 



260 The Brook in the Way, 

acter, sanctification, an increasing likeness 
to their Lord. They do not seek with Paul 
to apprehend that for which they have been 
apprehended. Well, they are dwarfs only 
and must stay such. No Syrians of the 
world, the flesh, the devil, are vanquished 
by a faithless smiting but three times. 

Significant for every one of us those words 
of the great Master : " My Father worketh 
hitherto and I work." 



DISSUASIVES FROM PRAYER. 

THAT is a very explicit Divine word com- 
ing to us out of the heavens : " And 
call upon me in the day of trouble ; I will 
deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me-" 

But while this word of God is very explicit 
to us, and while it legitimizes to us the great 
boon and blessing of prayer, it is not to be 
denied that there are many influences in us 
and about us dissuading us from prayer; 
making reply to this divine word, " Call," with 
a lower and human word, " Do not call." 

That is a very common word which Pros- 
perity has to say to us : " Do not call ; " " You 
do not need to call." It seems very strange 
that we should wrest the very blessings which 
God showers on us into dissuasives from 
prayer, yet how frequently do men do pre- 
cisely this. It was, I think, the thrifty Ben- 



262 The Brook in the Way. 

jamin Franklin who suggested to his father, 
when the well-filled pork barrel came into the 
house, that it would save time if he would say 
grace over the whole barrel once for all and 
have done with it, instead of delaying to thank 
God for the daily portions which the family 
would day by day consume. The feeling at 
the bottom of this suggestion was that, now 
that the larder was supplied, there was no 
longer any special need for God, at least in 
that direction. 

Such feeling is the temptation of prosperity. 
When a man begins in any wise to accumu- 
late, if he be not careful he will be smitten 
by the siren voices of accumulation: "You 
need not call on God ; " " You have a good 
bank account;" " You have a prosperous 
business; " " You are sufficient for yourself; " 
" You are independent." And, as the life of 
religion consists in a consciousness of depend- 
ence, and as the man's prosperity is eating 
away this consciousness of dependence, the 
religious life of this prosperous man is losing 
grasp, sinking, failing, going out. This is the 



Dissuasives from Prayer. 263 

temptation of prosperity : that to God's word 
"Call," it replies, " Don't call;" " You do 
not need to call." 

I always tremble for a man when I see such 
result of God's prosperous providence stealing 
over him. And I have often seen it. The 
trouble about it is, it is no rare thing to see. 
I remember such a man. Back in the years 
when he was comparatively poor, when life 
was a daily struggle and tussle to make the 
ends meet, no man could have been more 
recognizing of his dependence on God, more 
spiritual, more devout, readier and swifter in 
all holy service. But prosperity began to 
flow in on that man like a tide. Everything 
he touched turned out well. Larger house, 
better dress, more elegant appointments, fine 
equipage, travel, an abundance of all the rarer 
and finer furniture of life, — that was all right ; 
he could afford them all ; it was not in the 
least unchristian that he enjoy the good things 
his prosperity brought him. But the trouble 
was you began to mark a different tone strik- 
ing through all his religious life; it was as 



264 The Brook in the Way. 

evident as could be that the man was neglect- 
ing prayer, or praying only in machine and 
routine fashion. He did not give, in his pros- 
perity, in any wise proportionately to what 
he gave when he was less prosperous. Little 
by little he began to take his hands off reli- 
gious service, did not come to the prayer- 
meeting, or sat silent in it; could not spare 
time now for Sabbath-school work, benevo- 
lent work, church work of any sort. " Ah ! " 
those who knew him said ; " how different he 
is." It was perfectly plain he was losing his 
sense of dependence on God ; he was listen- 
ing to the siren song of prosperity droning, 
" Don't call," in answer to God's word " Call." 
I always tremble when I see a man doing 
thus. I think if a man needs God's help 
wisely and honestly to make a fortune, he 
needs God's help as much wisely and nobly 
to use and keep a fortune. Well, this man, 
becoming through his prosperity arrogantly 
self-dependent, lost his head, thought he 
could do anything, thought everything must 
turn out well with him, plunged into daring 



Dissuasives from Prayer. 265 

unfortunate investments, in a little time stood 
stripped. I do honestly think he would not 
have stood so if he had steadily refused to 
hear this tempting suggestion of prosperity, 
"Don't call;" if, instead, he had kept on 
" calling," as he was wont to do in his poorer 
days, asking God's help that now, with larger 
resource, he might the more largely use him- 
self for God's glory and the good of his fel- 
low-men. Oh ! as God makes for any one of 
us the days brighter with prosperity, let us 
scorn to be touched by this bad scepticism, 
exhaling so often like malaria from better 
days. To God's great word " Call " let us 
refuse to be so mean as to allow God's very 
blessings to frame themselves into the reply, 
" Don't call." 

Then, too, the usual work, routine, duty, 
pleasure of life, are apt to return to God's 
great word " Call," the answer " Do not call." 
*' I am hurried on too fast in the round of 
duties and enjoyments," said that sincere and 
noble man, Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, " and I 
greatly feel the need of stopping to consider 



266 The Brook in the Way. 

my ways and to recognize my own infinite 
weakness and unworthiness." " I am hurried 
on too fast." Ah, yes ! how true that is of 
most of us. And how this very hurry and 
push and pressure says to us, " Don't call ; " 
" You have too many things to do ; " " Never 
mind calling;" " It cannot be expected so 
busy a person should take much time to call 
on God." And so we shoot by the closet- 
door. An English clergyman taught with 
much pains an ignorant parishioner to read. 
He learned to read so well he could spell out 
the Bible very nicely. Visiting at his house 
some months afterward, the clergyman said 
to the man's wife : " I suppose your husband 
enjoys reading his Bible now very much?" 
" Oh ! dear no, sir," she said, " he 's left that 
long ago, and got into the newspaper." Yes, 
in this swift age there are so many newspapers 
to read, and they are so interesting, how easily 
we leave the Bible, say we have no time for 
it, for sake of them. In the rush and hurry 
we shoot by the closet-door, on the other side 
of which lies the Bible, with the dust gather- 



Dissuasives from Prayer. 267 

ing thickly on its covers ; on the other side 
of which waits for us the salutary silence of 
communion with God, the strength and spir- 
itual nurture of which we need so much, that 
we may know how to manage well these rush- 
ing lives of ours, — that they be really turned 
to some account, that they be not frayed and 
frittered out into poor nothingnesses. God 
says, " Call ; " but how often business and en- 
gagements and social duties and household 
duties and life's various rush and hurry reply, 
" Don't call." 

That is the strong life which shuts its ears 
to such dissuasives and will call. 



PAYING THE FARE. 

" So he Paid the Fare thereof." 

AND that was not a very great thing for 
Jonah to do ; ships were sailing con- 
stantly from Joppa to Tarshish, and I do 
not suppose the fare was exorbitant. And 
yet — 

When Charles the First was king of Eng- 
land the struggle struck between absolutism 
on the one hand and constitutional freedom 
on the other. Out of the throes of that 
struggle was born the ordered liberty which 
you and I, in this free land, enjoy. King 
Charles said, "I am king by Divine right; 
I will rule as I please." The English peo- 
ple said, " By what right soever you may be 
king, you must yet rule, not absolutely, but 
constitutionally. It is part of the British 
constitution that the money which goes into 



Paying the Fare. 269 

the king's hand for purposes of government 
must be voted him by a freely chosen House 
of Commons. If you, the king, are deter- 
mined to rule absolutely, we, the English 
people, represented by the House of Com- 
mons, will not vote you any money." 

Answered King Charles, " I am king by 
Divine right; I will rule as I please. If you 
will not vote me money I will take it. I need 
money for my navy; I herewith order that 
each English county be assessed to pay its 
proportion of the royal ship-money." 

John Hampden lived in Buckinghamshire. 
He was a wealthy man. Buckinghamshire 
was assessed to furnish for the royal navy 
a ship of four hundred and fifty tons. It was 
not a large assessment for a rich county, and 
the proportion of the assessment which would 
fall upon the wealthy John Hampden was 
very small, — but a few shillings. 

But precisely those few shillings the great 
and good John Hampden absolutely refused 
to pay, — not because he was unpatriotic, no 
man more loyal to king and country; not 



270 The Brook in the Way. 

because he was stingy, no man of wider 
heart; not because he could not, the few 
shillings were but as a drop compared with 
the river of his wealth, — but because the 
thing, the paying those few shillings, though 
so slight in itself, meant an immensity, meant 
the triumph of despotism and the death of 
freedom. And John Hampden's standing at 
that little thing has come to mean your 
liberty and mine. 

You can see plainly in this instance, I am 
sure, how a little thing in itself may mean 
and make vast things. 

So Jonah " paid the fare thereof," — not a 
great thing to do, not an unusual thing, not 
an exorbitant thing; but yet, for Jonah, it 
meant and made vast and sorrowful result. 

Let us think together a moment of what 
Jonah really bought when he paid his fare. 

Well, he bought his passage to Tarshish, 
you say. Yes, certainly he bought that ; but 
the paying that fare held results in its bosom, 
and Jonah could not help buying the results, 
too. 



Paying the Fare. 271 

He bought treachery toward Duty. Duty 
is a most weighty word. Spell it as it ought 
to be spelled, and you can begin to see how 
heavy a word it is — D-u-e-ty. Duty is that 
which is due, that which I owe, that which I 
ought. Ought! how majestic with mighty 
sanction what I ought is ! God is in that 
word " ought." God, then, is in duty. Treach- 
ery toward duty is treachery terrible. God's 
word came to Jonah, bidding him go preach 
in Nineveh. Jonah paid his fare to Tarshish, 
a place directly opposite from Nineveh. So 
he bought disloyalty of the utmost sort. 

I have met young men who have protested 
to me that they were never mean, that though 
they knew they were going on in courses of 
dissipation, they always paid their way like 
men ; if they lost money at gambling, they 
marched right up to it and settled these 
" debts of honor " like men ; if they were 
drinking with others, they were always wil- 
ling to pay their share of the costs. What- 
ever you might say of them, they affirmed, 
no one could ever say they were mean. No, 



272 The Brook in the Way. 

they paid their way, they laid down the fare 
of their dissipations right royally, — all of 
which may be very true. But I cannot see 
that all this they proclaim so loudly helps 
the matter very much. The chief question 
is, Have they any right to be paying such 
fare at all? When they pay it they cannot 
help buying at the same time the meanest 
sort of a commodity, — treachery to duty. 
Because Jonah paid his fare, it did not make 
it a high and noble thing that he should 
start for Tarshish when God told him to go 
to Nineveh. 

Jonah, paying this fare, bought also loss 
of the Divine presence. We read that Jonah 
" went down " from the presence of the Lord. 
God is present everywhere, indeed, but God 
specially manifests His presence to the heart 
true to Him. The consciousness of that pres- 
ence is the most precious and shining inner 
wealth. Not long since, in Bedford, Eng- 
land, I looked through the iron bars of the 
old jail-door which used to shut brave John 
Bunyan in. But the iron bars could not 



Paying the Fare. 273 

shut out from Bunyan the sweet sense of 
God's presence. I like much his rough 
measures. He could not help singing, so 
glad his heart was because God was with 
him, — 

" I am indeed in prison now 
In body, but my mind 
Is free to study Christ, and how 
Unto me He is kind. 

" For though men keep my outward man 
Within these locks and bars, 
Yet, by the faith of Christ, I can 
Mount higher than the stars. 

" When they do talk of banishment, 
Of death, or such like things, 
Then, to me, God sends heart-content 
That like a fountain springs." 

Well, the miserable James the Second, on 
his throne, was not so rich as honest John 
behind these bars. There is nothing so 
precious as God's smile shining into your 
heart. The loss of this shining Jonah bought 
when he paid his fare. He went down from 
the presence of the Lord. 

My dear friend, you say you are getting 
a good deal of pleasure out of life ; you are 

18 



274 The Brook in the Way. 

young, you are having a good time, and you 
mean to have it. But are you losing, through 
what you get, the consciousness of God's 
presence? If you are, you are losing treas- 
ure immeasurable. And the loss of that 
is always a going down. 

Jonah also bought, when he paid his fare, 
trouble for himself. I suppose it all went 
well enough at first. The sea was smooth. 
The breezes were gentle. The sails were 
filled. The oars dipped merrily in the wa- 
ters. But you remember a storm came be- 
fore very long, and all sorts of other trouble 
came to Jonah, — the being cast overboard, 
and the slimy entombment in the great fish. 
Jonah bought all this trouble when he paid 
his fare. Be you very sure of this, that sin 
must bring trouble, and that when you buy 
sin you cannot help buying its trouble too. 
Says the Buddhist proverb, " As the cart- 
wheel follows the tread of the ox, so punish- 
ment follows sin." 

Said a young man to me once, "If God 
is good, as you say He is, why does He 



Paying the Fare. 275 

let me be so wretched as I am? If He were 
good, I should think He would make it 
pleasanter for me." 

" And you know you are going on in sin," 
I answered. " Yes," he said, " I acknowl- 
edge that." " Do you think," I asked, " God 
would be good to you if He made a sinful 
path pleasant for you ; does He not make 
you tread on thorns because He wants you 
to turn into the right path? Is not your 
trouble the best possible proof of His love? " 

" Yes, it must be so," he said, after think- 
ing a little. " God could not be good if He 
made sin pleasant." No, He could not be. 
God will not, cannot, make sin happy. If 
you pay the fare of sin, you must, as Jonah 
did, purchase bitter trouble with your fare. 

Jonah bought also when he paid his fare 
a more difficult repentance. 

To Nineveh, eastward, was about six hun- 
dred miles. To Tarshish, westward, was more 
than a thousand miles. Is it not the plainest 
of plain things that the farther Jonah went 
toward Tarshish, the farther back he would 



276 The Brook in the Way. 

have to go to reach Nineveh? Every mile 
in the wrong direction was an added mile to 
be re-traversed toward the right. The far- 
ther one goes on in evil, the longer and the 
harder is the way back. 

Poor purchase, was it not — that fare? 

Poor purchase ! But what sort of a pur- 
chase are you making? 



ROLLED AWAY. 

THE death there on the cross ; the quench- 
ing of hope ; the begging the beloved 
body ; the hurried sepulture ; the great stone 
blocking the tomb's mouth ; the at once pro- 
hibiting and identifying Roman seal ; the 
pacing of the sentinels ; the vigil of the loving 
women, and then the gathering of the shad- 
ows of that Friday evening; their deepening 
into night; and afterward, the long hours of 
that tragic Saturday, while He whom they 
trusted would have redeemed Israel lay, chill 
and lifeless, as real a subject of Death's 
empire as any one of the countless company 
who, in the long course of human history, 
had gone over to the majority. 

Do you know how you may test your love? 
You may be sure your love is genuine if it 
prompt you to serve, not alone in great, but, 



278 The Brook in the Way, 

with exceeding carefulness, in little things. 
A love which is laggard in little things, is a 
love the heat of which has slackened. A 
great love glorifies lowly duties, instead of 
neglecting them ; hastens to put its hands to 
them, and transfigures them. How a mother 
delights to do even menial things for her sick 
child. " Entire affection hateth nicer hands." 
You say you love, but if you willingly blurr 
the infinitesimals of service you do not much 
know what a real love is. 

Well, the high hopes of these loving women 
are smitten, but their love glows on, and 
therefore they are concerned about details. 
That burial was hurried. The cerements were 
not wound as love would have them, and the 
embalming spices were neither as plentiful nor 
as accurately placed as love would wish. 

So, on that first day of the week, as soon 
as the sunrise would yield love light, they 
hasten. To the last fold, love would decorate 
and arrange that shroud, and with exquisite 
attention surround that body with fragrant 
spices. But there is a difficulty. Often love's 



Rolled Away. 279 

feet must tread rough paths, but because 
they are the feet of love they will go on 
treading. 

The stone still blocks the tomb's mouth : 
it is a great stone, beyond these women's 
strength to move ; and besides, it is a stone 
stamped with the Roman seal, which none may 
tamper with but at the risk of life ; and be- 
sides, as the women think, the sentinels are 
still pacing their guarding beat. 

It is no wonder they question, " Who shall 
roll us away the stone ? " Who shall? They 
do not ' know. They cannot tell. But the 
noteworthy thing is they go on toward the 
stone notwithstanding. Yes, it is also a test 
of a real love that it will go out against the 
hugest obstacles, as well as be punctiliously 
careful of little things. 

So even the great stone cannot daunt such 
love as theirs. 

And when at last they reach the tomb, the 
stone was rolled away. God interferes for 
love. The Resurrection smooths the path for 
love's determined feet. 



280 The Brook in the Way, 

Ah, well ! If we loved more, if we were 
but more facile to love's prompting; if we 
were but more anxious to do little duties for 
our Lord's sake, even though obstacles might 
seem to hinder; if we would but go on to ser- 
vice notwithstanding, how many stones should 
we find rolled away, and what revelation 
should we receive of God's care and path- 
making for a love which must express itself 
in service. 

But we love so little that we do not go 
forth, though the stone be there ; so we miss 
what shining and strange help God has for a 
great love ! If we but loved more, with such 
love as could not leave the attempt at little 
services unmade, even though a high hin- 
drance seemed to uprear itself, we should 
know — how immensely ! — more of the won- 
derful help of God. 



GOD'S GREAT JEWEL. 

IN the long line of British heroes there is 
no one who wrought more nobly both 
for India herself and for England in India 
than Lord John Lawrence. Somehow there 
had come into the possession of the British 
the mountain of light, the marvellous Koh-i- 
noor. For safe keeping the great gem was 
made over to the Board of Government of 
the Punjab Province, and by the Board made 
over to the personal keeping of Lord John 
Lawrence himself. Half unconsciously, Lord 
John thrust the diamond, wrapped in numer- 
ous folds of cloth, and laid in an insignificant 
little box, into his waistcoat pocket. Bur- 
dened with all sorts of duties, and tasked even 
to the limit of his surprising industry, Lord 
John kept working on, and thought no more 
of the precious treasure. He changed his 



282 The Brook in the Way. 

dress for dinner, and threw his waistcoat aside, 
still forgetting all about the box it held. 
Some six months afterward there came a 
message from Lord Dalhousie that the Queen 
had ordered that the great jewel be sent to 
her at once. The matter was mentioned by 
Sir Henry Lawrence, a brother of Lord John, 
at the Board, when Lord John answered, 
" Send for it at once ! " 

" Why, you 've got it," replied Sir Henry. 

Then it all flashed upon Lord John — the 
fact that he was in possession of the gem — 
his carelessness. Thought Lord John, " Well, 
this is the worst trouble I have ever got 
into." 

But Lord John was a man of iron nerve, 
and gave no outward sign of his inward quak- 
ing. He went on with the business of the 
meeting as though nothing had happened, 
saying simply, " O yes, of course ; I forgot 
all about it." He soon, however, seized an 
opportunity of slipping to his private room, 
and with his heart in his mouth sent for his 
native servant, and said to him : " Have you 



God's Great Jewel. 283 

a small box which was in my waistcoat pocket 
some time ago ? " 

" Yes, Sahib," the man answered, " I found 
it, and put it in one of your boxes." 

" Bring it here," said Lord John. 

The old servant went to a battered tin box 
and brought the little one from it. 

" Open it," said Lord John, " and see what 
is inside." 

So, anxiously enough, Lord John watched 
the man unwinding fold after fold of the poor 
rags which wrapped the jewel round ; and 
what was his relief when he saw the sun-like 
gem shine out. 

The old servant seemed entirely uncon- 
scious of the immense treasure he had been 
having in his keeping. " There is nothing 
here, Sahib," said the old servant, " but a 
bit of glass." Carefully now the gem was 
guarded till the Queen herself laid it among 
the jewels of her crown. 

Yet there is a rarer and more lustrous, and 
more costly jewel far, which men are wont 
to treat as though it were of no worth what- 



284 The Brook in the Way, 

ever. Like Lord John they wrap it about 
with the rags of neglect, and then, engaged 
with other things, forget all about it. Or, 
like the old servant, when, perchance, it is 
displayed to them, they declare it nothing 
but a bit of glass. 

It seemed to me I saw the gleam of God's 
great jewel in these words of Scripture the 
other day: "In whom we have redemption 
through His blood, the forgiveness of sins 
according to the riches of His grace." And 
as I looked at it entranced, the jewel of God 
seemed to flash light upon me from these 
four facets, — what men may have, when 
men may have it, how men may have it, how 
much they may have. 

Let the flash from the first facet shine 
upon you for a moment, — what men may 
have; redemption, the forgiveness of sins. 
Redemption — that is a large word ; it in- 
cludes the sublime whole of the Divine gifts 
to us through Jesus Christ our Lord. But 
an angle and element of this redemption is 
here shown us, — the forgiveness of sins. 



God's Great Jewel. 285 

And that word translated " sins " is a word 
significant. It means literally, I think, a 
badly heedless falling, and so sin. It has 
often seemed to me as though Samson were 
an admirable specimen of a quite usual sin- 
ner. I do not mean so much in the special 
sins he did, as in the spirit in which he 
wrought them. He felt so strong; he was 
so heedless ; he fell so easily, sadly, surely. 
How often a young man says, " I am too 
strong to fall," and then foolishly flings him- 
self into temptation, and then tumbles. So 
from the right and true he falls through a 
wilful heedlessness. But such a fall is sin. 
He did not mean to sin. He thought he 
would not. But he heedlessly went where 
sin abounded, and marching on, as he thought, 
securely, his foot was tripped by sin's multi- 
tudinous snares, and down he went almost 
before he knew it. He " did n't think." But 
when your boy says that to you, in excuse 
for some poor heedlessness, your rightful 
reply is, " You ought to think ; that is pre- 
cisely the trouble, that you did not." Yes, 



286 The Brook in the Way, 

a sin springing from a wilful heedlessness 
is still a sin. Who of us has not thus 
tumbled? 

And against our sins must burn the Divine 
resentment. God is not a mere nebulosity of 
good-nature. God is not a poor and nerve- 
less mist of easy-going sentiment. There is 
such a thing as the Divine holiness, which 
must mean an active and pure going forth 
against that which is opposed to itself. I 
think it would be well for all of us if we 
thought more upon the cannots of God. 
Here is one as irreversible as the Divine 
nature itself, — God cannot make sin blessed. 
And also, our own better nature burns against 
these sins of ours. I was reading, not long 
since, how once the late William Cullen 
Bryant, after reaching his office one morning, 
and trying in vain to begin work, turned to 
his associate and said : — 

" I cannot get along at all this morning." 

" Why not? " the other asked. 

"Oh," replied Mr. Bryant, "I have done 
wrong. When on my way here a little boy, 



God's Great Jewel. 287 

flying a kite, passed me. The string of the 
kite rubbed against my face. I seized it and 
broke it. I did wrong; I ought to have paid 
him." 

I am sure such quick sensitiveness of 
conscience every one must think most right 
and noble. Against our heedless sins, in just 
the proportion of our true manhood our own 
better nature burns. In addition still, since 
God must be against our sins, and our own 
consciences are against them, there must be 
doom for them. I do not believe it possible 
for a man really to think himself out of the 
fact, if he thinks at all, that there must be 
such a thing as punishment for his sins. 

Now here is God's great jewel sending 
wonderful flash into the darkness of our con- 
viction of sin, — the forgiveness of sins. And 
that word translated " forgiveness " is a great 
word also. It means literally a forgiveness 
which is a letting free from sin ; God's anger 
ceases ; the resentment of our own conscience 
may; sin's doom is dissipated. "Behold, 
I have cast thy sins behind my back ; I have 



288 The Brook in the Way. 

drowned them in the ocean of my forgetful- 
ness," says God. 

I do not think that any man who has ever 
known what the feeling of sin is can call this 
divine gift of the forgiveness of sins only a 
bit of glass. 

But God's great jewel flashes light upon 
me from another facet ; when men may have 
this redemption. I wait and think upon that 
blessed present tense of Scripture, — in whom 
we have. That is not subjunctive mood, 
may have; that is not future tense, will 
have ; that is indicative mood, present tense, 
— in whom we have. The jewel is mine at 
this moment. Redemption is a present pos- 
session for believing men. It were better for 
us if we sought more present-tense experi- 
ence. The Bible is full of the possibility and 
promise of it. Such a present possession is 
not a bit of glass. 

I keep looking at the great jewel, and from 
another facet a wonderful light gleams ; how 
men may have this redemption. My eyes 
fasten on these words : in whom, that is, 



God's Great Jewel. 289 

Christ. All I have to do is take Christ, and 
I get it all. No painful penances, no hard 
doing of hard drudgery. The great gift is held 
in the pierced hand, and that hand opens 
immediately at the faintest call of my faith. 
If my faith will let Him, He will give it to 
me. Such ease of getting is certainly not a 
bit of glass. 

Once more, from still another facet a holy 
light streams from this jewel out ; how much 
of this redemption may I have? According 
to the riches of His grace. 

I wake up on some June morning, and I 
ask myself, How much of a day may I have? 
and as the light streams in at my window, 
the answer comes to me, according to the 
shining of the sun. That means all that the 
sun will disclose to me, — the white encamp- 
ments of the clouds in the blue heavens ; 
the wide array of summer landscape ; the 
flash of the sea as it sends back the sun- 
beams ; the fresh garniture of the June 
leaves ; the bursting beauty of the flowers 
at my feet; that means vastly more than 

19 



290 The Brook in the Way, 

I can possibly take in, by my meagre senses, 
through the long hours of the glorious day. 

According to the riches of His grace. How 
much that means it will take eternity to dis- 
cover. Forgiveness, regeneration, adoption, 
sanctification, peace, joy, love, resurrection, 
heaven ; what a wondrous jewel of God this 
is which flames and flashes according to the 
riches of His grace. Surely this is no bit of 
glass. It is a vast diamond of the first water. 
Oh, if men only would take what God has 
for them in the Lord Jesus ! 



THE LIFE VANISHING, YET 
VALUABLE. 

"TTX)R what is your life? It is even a vapor 
•A- that appeareth for a little time, and then 
vanisheth away." Common enough, that 
symbol of our human lives, and true enough. 
Truer it gets to be as life goes on, and the 
months hasten breathlessly, and the year 
rushes to its close before it fairly seems to 
have begun. 

You have seen the vapor lying on the 
mountain-side. I remember a morning I 
looked forth upon it front the summit of 
Mt. Washington. I wanted to see the sun 
ride forth gloriously in his strength. It was 
December on the mountain-top, though it 
was August in the valleys. In the wintry 
chill and in the faint light of the early morn- 
ing I cast my eyes abroad. Below me, just 



292 The Brook in the Way. 

as far as sight could reach, was one vast 
ocean of billowy vapor. The waves of it 
swayed, and writhed, and rose, and fell, and 
settled down damp and impenetrable upon 
the earth beneath. Only here and there the 
black peak of some loftier summit protruded, 
like a little island, above the misty sea. The 
vapor was triumphant. It had climbed the 
rocky mountain-sides and overswept and 
vanquished them. 

Then the sun appeared. He flung abroad 
the slanting javelins of his beams. They 
smote and pierced the vapor. Insensibly, 
but quickly, the vapor melted into the trans- 
parent air. Clearly, and more clearly still, 
stood forth the mountains. Now the sun- 
light, cleaving the mists, poured radiance into 
the lowliest valleys. Shreds of vapor clung 
still, here and there, in the more shaded 
corners. But soon these were burned away. 
And in a little time the whole grand land- 
scape — from the blue line where, miles away, 
the ocean met the coast, to the far uprising 
of the Adirondacks — was cleared of every 



The Life Vanishing, yet Valuable, 293 

particle of mist. It was a large and swaying 
ocean of vast vapor; and then, how soon, 
it — was not. Your life is even as a vapor, 
which appeareth for a little time, and then 
vanisheth away. 

And how more and more life gets to seem 
like it. Back in your boyhood or your girl- 
hood, do you not remember how laggard 
seemed the time? Christmas would never 
come, as you counted the weeks and days 
which led to it. Fourth of July — could the 
slowly revolving weeks ever bring it round? 
Vacation — the stretch of term before it was 
interminable. 

But now, amid the stir of young manhood 
or young womanhood, or at the centre point 
of life, or amid the lengthening shadows of 
life's afternoon, how like a weaver's shuttle 
and with accelerating swiftness fly the years ! 

Well, life is like a vapor in this quick 
vanishing of it. 

But, in another sense, is life like a vapor 
to too many, — not only in the sense of its 
vanishingness, but of its tracelessness. 

There it is clinging to the mountain-side, 



294 The Brook in the Way, 

that shred of vapor. You gaze upon it, and 
even while you look, thinner it grows, and 
thinner still, and then — is gone. Nor can 
you find, in any wise, the place to which it 
clung. Gone it is, leaving no wrack behind. 
It but clung there for a short season and 
then vanished, and that is all of it. Too 
much is life like that to many, — not simply 
vanishing, but traceless of much value, to 
great degree resultless of worth or blessing. 

But though life must be like the vapor in 
its vanishing, it need not be like the vapor 
in its tracelessness. If we will but have it so, 
we may make this vaporous, vanishing life a 
mighty force and energy for God's glory and 
for our brother's help. 

Why, think a moment, even that poor 
vapor holds within itself immense possibili- 
ties of power. I was sailing home from 
Europe the other year. Near the banks of 
Newfoundland we were met by a northwest- 
ern storm. The wind was very strong. It was 
dead ahead. It pushed with its whole might 
against the vessel. It piled the huge waves 
in her path. It dashed them furiously against 



The Life Vanishing, yet Valuable. 295 

her bows, as though the tempest would forbid 
the vessel's progress. There was an enor- 
mous force disputing the vessel's way. 

But while the storm could dispute, it could 
not prevent. Onward the vessel went, and 
onward. The waves were mounted or cut 
by her never-resting keel. The winds were 
baffled. Steadily toward her port the vessel 
moved, and kept on moving. There was a 
force within the steamer mightier than the 
stormy power without. There was within 
that ship the force of vapor we call steam, 
and that was all ; but that was enough. 

Did you wait there, in wonder, by the 
throbbing heart of the Centennial Exhibi- 
tion, ten years back, — that Corliss engine? 
Did you see it, as swaying back and forth 
its ponderous arms, it lent the life of its 
own motion to those ten thousand whirling 
wheels? Did you mark it as it lifted and 
then sent crashing down some tremendous 
trip-hammer, and at the same moment deftly 
plied some fragile needle, or laid soft touch 
on some slight and curious mechanism? 
And that which was behind and within the 



296 The Brook in the. Way. 

engine, stirring it to life, and so communi- 
cating life to that treasure-house of various 
industry, was but a vapor, — that was all. 

And so this life of yours and mine, though 
it must be vanishing, need not be traceless. 
There is possibility of power in this vanishing 
life. It can be used for something. It can 
be made to tell. Managed rightly, as men 
manage steam, which is only vapor, it may 
count mightily. It may leave results. It 
may become a blessing crowned. 

Yes, if only we compel to worthy service 
what is left to us of this swiftly consuming 
life, though we cannot prevent it from being 
like a vapor, vanishing, we may prevent it 
from being like a vapor, traceless; we may 
imprison it in holy duty, and set it moving 
toward such right result that at the last the 
Great Master shall say of the way we have 
used it : " Well done, good and faithful ser- 
vant." 

THE END. 



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